A little while ago I mentioned how Lux was adding a Japanese localization. And it did in version 5, along with some other funky languages. Since Lux is written in Java it makes it generally pretty easy to support languages that use extended character sets.
The problem is that the current build of PHP on my server doesn't have multibyte string support in it. So this means that whenever the ranking system or tracker encounter a Japanese or other multibyte character they mess them up.
Checking in my server control panel I see it looks easy enough to rebuild PHP with mbstring support. My powerbook's PHP actually came with mbstring enabled, so I already have a test bed for it.
Except PHP with mbstring enabled doesn't like normal POST data. Or it doesn't translate it how I want it to or something. Fiddling with the php.ini mbstring options doesn't seem to help, and I don't really want to go to the effort of testing multipart/form-data POST data since application/x-www-form-urlencoded is so much simpler.
In short: Bleeeech! Maybe this will end up being an excuse to rewrite some of my PHP into server-side java...
For the Sillysoft Newsletter I wanted an email mailing list that also had an RSS feed of itself. This way users could subscribe whichever way they want. I didn't find anything that did what I wanted so I created my own using PHP and a MySQL database.
I mentioned it on the macsb mailing list offering to share my code. A few people seemed interested, so I cleaned it up a bunch and hereby release it as RSSMailingList!
If you want a combination RSS feed generator and mailing list manager then check it out.
RSS is an exciting, yet not quite new standard that lets you publish news from your page for other pages to syndicate. FeedCreator.class.php provides an easy way to create RSS feeds from within PHP using easy to use classes.
As it turns out sillytech's RSS feeds weren't validating because of some date formatting issue. Thanks to someone who had already been through this all I had to do was a targeted web search.
