Why does this happen?

Hi Joe, we have the same problem as well. I did post something about this awhile back, but I don't know if it's something that can be resolved. Barry said it might have to do with who we use, for example, TypePad. But I haven't had any luck fixing it. We do try to stay away from quote marks, etc., but that can be a pain. Maybe someone will figure it out this second time around. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

What browser are you both using? I can't get the problem to appear on mine... I'm using FireFox and Safari.

I use Internet Explorer and the same thing happens when I view certain text, too.

It's got something to do with the character encoding. This happened on my personal blog when Wordpress changed its default encoding to UTF-8 without accounting for the fact that the databases were still in (I believe) latin1.

Even techier explanation here.

Dan, it happens to me on Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Netscape.

Dan,

I've had this happen on Firefox. Thanks for looking into it.

I found the solution to the weird characters in our blogs. The main culprits are quote marks and apostrophes. What you need to do is convert them from "curly" quotes to straight quotes. Same with apostrophes. How do you do this?

If you are creating your blogs in Word, then pasting them in, make sure you have the "smart quotes" turned off before typing in Word.

Or what I did was create them in a simple text program and saved it as a .txt or .rtf file. Just make sure those are straight not curly.

The problem is that you need to use "non-ASCII characters. You will find the same problem with a "em dash". I changed it to a double dash and that solved the problem.

Hope I made this clear enough. If not, let me know.

We will get this fixed on our end soon, so that you can use curly quotes if you want to, and they will render correctly. Thanks for helping us sleuth it out.

Okay, I was asked how you change the "smart quotes" in Word. It's never as simple as a one click deal : )

First go to the "Tools" menu Click on "AutoCorrect" Choose the "AutoFormat As You Type" and under replace as you type uncheck "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" and ta-dah!!

By the way, the previous post was in regards to Microsofts Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.3. Can't be sure it's the same in other versions ; )

This problem is now fixed! Hooray for our new development team, Integrum Technology.

Joe, Until now, Biznik has been being developed by one full-time developer. Now we have access to more developers. What does this mean for the community? It means that bugs will get fixed faster, and new features will get developed more quickly.

Great News Dan. Now that "Integrum" has joined hands,development of Biznik will gather lot of momentum. Looking forward to even better and slick version of Biznik with host of top notch features. Must say right decision at right time...

Best, Anita CM