Character issues

No, this might not be what you think. I'm not doing a topic about personal character and integrity; it's about cross-platform issues with the accented characters required by the French language. Geek stuff, I guess.

Thanks to my friend Ginny, who uses a Mac and the Safari browser, for the heads-up. Even my em-dashes are not displaying correctly, according to screen captures of the blog text as displayed on a Mac in Safari, which Ginny has sent. I wonder what my euro symbol looks like in Safari.

A sample of blog text with garbage characters instead of the proper accented ones

If you are seeing garbage characters and strings in my blog text, let me know. And tell me what OS and browser your are using. I'm on Windows XP Professional, and I use Firefox 2.0.0.1. And I'm "authoring," as the jargon would have it, in Google's Blogger software, on line.

Ginny's comments about display anomalies inspired me to look up some statistics about the readers of this blog. I can't get names or any other personal information about you, but here's a sample of what I do get.

It seems that 78% of the readers of this blog are using Windows-based systems. Another 21% are using MacOS X.


Only 13% of you are using the Firefox browser. The great majority of you, 67%, use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the other 20% use a version of Safari.


Finally, 76% of you are in the U.S., and 13% are in France. No other country of origin is in double digits...


Since January 22, 2005, the number of visits (not separate visitors, mind you) to my Living in Saint-Aignan blog has been about 12,300. That doesn't count visits by me or Walt. We have the visit-tracking software configured to ignore visits from our own computers. As you can imagine, we visit many times a day to proofread and edit our postings.