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Love thy neighbour use UTF-8

I run UK based websites which have international reach.
Specifically a travel essentials site with more than 5k pages indexed at G sees exposure to Europe and its various languages.
A while back I allowed Link-Vault.com to start showing non UK advertising on this site.
To my surprise there was quite a take up by Germans Polish sites and further not so common languages.

They do have one thing in common they use special characters like umlaut accent super scripted etc.
The standard
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=\”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\”>
is limited in it\’s display capabilities and usage of these.

Digging around a bit and testing I now switches the site to use UTF-8
<meta http-eqiv=\”Content-Type\” content=\”text/html; charset=utf-8\”>
No it does not use more bandwidth but there are some things worth noticing

Here is some blurb about coding and bandwidth implication

With UTF-16, all characters—at least, all the ones you\’re likely to use—require 2 octets, so the phrase \”Hello, world!\” will use 26 octets to store 13 characters. This is only required if one uses complex characters like Chinese and will have obvious bandwidth implications.

With UTF-8, basic ASCII characters require only 1 octet, so \”Hello, world!\” would use only 13 octets to store 13 characters; however, Cyrillic or accented European characters require 2 octets each, and other characters for other languages can require up to 6 octets.

With the ISO-8859 character encoding, each character requires only 1 octet, even accented European characters, but any characters not in the set require html/XML character references, such as м.

so utf-8 instead of ü is probably more efficient

The placement of the Meta tag is important

<html>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv=\”Content-Type\” content=\”text/html; charset=utf-8\”>

But that meta tag really has to be the very first thing in the r sees this tag it\’s going to stop parsing the page and start over after reinterpreting the whole page using the encoding you specified.

So one doesnt want a head interpreted only to be run again….

Also using UK based systems and standards as well as an older version of DW to manipulate Dreamweaver I use a blank template to generate new pages (if ever).

If one uses special characters that are not on the keyboard it is advisable to check the UTF coding and use this instead of country standards. I found this out the hard way when using superscript degree which is coded differently in ISO than in UTF.

Otherwise I\’m pleased that umlaute and other specials now seem to show correctly.

I\’m eager to see if now these are slurped up correctly by the SE\’s and will keep you posted

Expat

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Refresh your windows registry

OK so you look after your PC. Trow out old apps and temo docs as well as cleaning up behind your favorite browser. See keep it running for more tips.

One ofter overlooked fact is that windows uses a registry to keep which is sort of a who is who on your computer and contains vital information for windows to function.

All files breathe – the get larger over time and may contain deleted records or spaces where there where records.
The problem with the registry is it\’s not a straight forward file and maybe locked when windows is started.
There is the registry editor that can be used but is a bit of a tool for nerds.

Now there is a nifty Little tool that on a click saves and restores your registry and the saved version can easily be taken off-line just in case.
Have look at this brilliant Little tool Backup – Restore registry

The backup and than the immediate restore will compress empty spaces out of the file and readjust the size.

Another simple bit often forgotten task.

Expat

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Google forcing country extension – not with me please

Our big friend (or foe) G has done it again. They are now trying to force country extension. Thus if your IP hints at being uk G will set a country redirect and although you have Google.com as your home page you will end up with google.co.uk.

I personally hate this as when I want UK or De results I go there.

The best way to get round this seem to be to set the No Country Redirect cookie or NRC as it is called.

The call to G to do this is http://www.google.com/ncr to set it permanently as your IE home page (as you cant do it using IE) :

call regedit – Internet Explorer – Main – Start Page and override whatever is in there.
If you don\’t happen to have this value its value name = Start Page value = http://www.google.com/ncr

Whilst you at it it is also a good idea to check other values to make sure you are not giving away too much.

This will be described in depth in one of my next blogs.

Expat @ MBGJ