Theory 1: "The Internet exists to make me look smart." --John Scalzi
A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I'm editing, but when I post they become weird strings of nonsense characters in the middle of the text.
How do I stop that from happening, other than going through and replacing every suspect character by hand? I generally edit posts on Firefox, but I might be cutting and pasting from other browasers.
Theory 2: The Internet exists to provide a creative outlet for people to express themselves.
In support of this thoery, and via TNH's Particles, I offer The last 100 pictures uploaded to LiveJournal. It's image-heavy, so don't look without broadband, but it's sort of fascinating to see a quick cross-section of the huge variety of things people are posting.
Theory 3: The Internet exists to facilitate the distrubution of dirty pictures.
In this case, vaguely sexual images generated with Mathematica (via an email list). May or may not be safe for work, depending on where you work.
Theory 4: The Internet exists to allow people to vote in opinion polls.
Comments
Internet is also for serious and not so serious blogging.
Posted by: coturnix | February 22, 2006 8:36 AM
A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I'm editing, but when I post they become weird strings of nonsense characters in the middle of the text.
That's possibly a feature of the abomination that is Microsoft Smart Quotes. See here for more info. About the only solution I can think of is doing a global search and replace.
Posted by: Corkscrew | February 22, 2006 9:06 AM
Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I'm editing, but when I post they become weird strings of nonsense characters in the middle of the text.
You also might want to try first copying and pasting the text into a plain text editor. Notebook might do the trick, or try text edit in plain text mode. I think this will convert smart quotes to normal quotes. Then paste them into MT.
Posted by: ThePolynomial | February 22, 2006 10:41 AM
If you use a Mac, TextWrangler (a plain text editor) has a set of useful commands that I use for stuff like this, such as "straighten quotes" and "zap gremlins" (which replaces non-ASCII characters with a big "•" (a bullet point character) that I never use myself, and which I can search and find easily in order to correct.
Posted by: UndergradChemist | February 23, 2006 3:48 AM
Chad, there's a Movable Type plugin to deal with this problem. See here for more information.
Posted by: Charles Kuffner | February 23, 2006 10:28 AM
My theory is:
The internet exists to harvest collectively the free time of people and distribute the by-products to the world.
ie.. Linux, Wikipedia, Fark...
Posted by: cooper | March 3, 2006 4:46 AM