My Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

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March 11, 2008
18 Comment

Feedblitz weirdness?

Some of you get daily emails from Feedblitz with the latest Happiness Project posts.

Have you recently started seeing strange characters appearing in the place of punctuation? If so, when? I’ve heard from just a few people that this has happened, and I’m trying to figure out if the problem is widespread.

If you have a sec, please post a comment below so I can try to get a fix on the scope of the problem.

Does anyone have any idea what might be the cause of this sort of thing?

Sorry about this — I know it’s maddening to see those crazy characters dotting the screen.

Thanks!

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  1. Safari readers: I share your pain. And I’m working on it.
  • Kristin

    I see your posts through Livejournal’s built-in feed reader (it shows up on my friendslist along with normal LJ posts), and I just noticed that your last post had that issue. I hadn’t noticed it before that, though.

  • http://mylablog.wordpress.com kat

    I’m going to make the assumption that you’re writing and formating all of your text in Word and then cutting & pasting into your blog. If so, that’s your problem…formating.
    If you must write in word first for spelling and grammar, I’d suggest you skip the formating, cut & paste (or convert) into a .txt. Then cut & paste that into your blog and format from there.
    I had this problem with my site’s blog in the past. It’s extra steps, I admit, but if you just install a couple of (grammar/spelling/formating) plug-ins directly to your blog platform, you’ll be able to skip completely over the whole word and .txt part, and just write and format directly through your blog.
    Funny story, this is why I’ve yet to put up the interview you sent in the other day…I have to reformat everything and well, that means I have to be in the write mindset for that sort of thing. But don’t worry, it’s on the to-do list for this week!! ;-)
    Shoot me an email if you need any other help.

  • http://mylablog.wordpress.com kat

    PS – it was fine in my Google Reader.

  • Barbara

    Whenever I get your message through feedblitz the punctuation always is garbled around the word. Yes, I do suffer from Feedblitz Weirdness!!

  • Shirley McClintock

    How did you get started in writing?

  • joyce

    About the crazy letters/signs…
    It appears to happen in place of quotation marks. At one time my daughter was using my computer for her Japanese schoolwork and Asian characters popped up in place of apostrophe’s. You might check your character map or translation conversions to see if anything has changed. I’m no techie but it fixed it for me.

  • Stacy

    Copied and Pasted from Feedblitz:
    Which of these four work categories describes you?
    One thing I???ve concluded about the study of happiness is that it???s important to notice which principles are universal, and which ones aren???t.
    For example, a universal principle is that people are made happy by an ???atmosphere of growth.??? (That???s one element of my First Splendid Truth.)
    But how people achieve that atmosphere of growth varies tremendously. One person gets it from traveling; another, by raising children; another, by learning a new software program; another, by renovating the basement.
    So to say that traveling is a key to happiness, or that traveling is a big waste of time, is foolish.
    Along the same lines, I was thinking about the differences among people and their approach to work. Here are four proposed work styles:
    Answering the call
    One kind of work is a ???calling.??? A calling is very difficult to resist, and indeed, people with a calling sometimes find themselves working for no pay. People have callings for many different fields: science, math, music, art, literature, film, acting, finance, medicine, design, religion???I recently learned a fascinating term, a service heart, which describes the calling that people feel to provide personal service to others.
    One problem with a calling is that sometimes a person wishes that he or she didn???t feel a particular call. For example, some callings are very well paid, and/or highly respected, and others aren???t. It???s very hard to get paid as a poet; it???s much easier to be paid as a doctor. It???s very painful to give up a calling, even if you want to give it up.
    Climbing the ladder
    Some people have a lot of ambition, but no particular calling. They want to work hard and be successful, but aren???t attached to a particular field. They gravitate to jobs that suit their skills and allow for advancement.
    Some people assume that those climbing the ladder have sold their souls, or are desperately unhappy, because they work in a field like accounting or corporate law. But that???s not necessarily so.
    Ladder-climbers don???t have the urgent motivation felt by people with a calling, but they can derive huge satisfaction from work. If you know a lot about any field, and especially if you???re good at it, you tend to find it fascinating.
    Keeping busy
    Some people are energetic but not ambitious. They don???t have a particular calling, and they???re not particularly worried about success, but they like the bustle and gratification of working hard. They can happily direct their energies toward a wide variety of goals.
    Hanging out
    ???How sweet it is to do nothing??? ??? for some people. Some folks enjoy leisure a great deal; they can enjoy themselves without any particular work to do. They don???t seem to work at much, just live their lives.
    I talked to a friend about these categories, and he added a fifth: Waiting for instructions. These folks are between stages, trying to figure out what to do next.
    What???s the significance of these work categories for happiness?
    The First Splendid Truth holds that to think about happiness, you must think about:
    ??? feeling good
    ??? feeling bad
    ??? feeling right
    ??? in an atmosphere of growth.
    The different work categories would play out differently for happiness, because of the different satisfactions they bring ??? also, depending on how a person???s fate plays out.

  • Angela

    It does appear to be in place of quotation marks, and for the ones I get in my email, it is on again, off again. It’s a little frustrating, but I think YOUR worth it!
    Seriously, my own happiness project is a lot less organized than yours, but you always give me something to think about. I hope to get my project a little more organized, but it’ll have to wait till I graduate in May and pass the NCLEX. Between school, my 1 yr old, my 11 yr old and my husband, there aren’t enough hours in the day! (And I’m the queen of time management ;-) If I do say so myself. Ha Ha)

  • Dave

    I believe that Kat in the second post is correct. You can also change Word so that the use of smart quotes and dashes are not used. If you have Word 2003 this can be changed by clicking on Tools, AutoCorrect Options. Then click on the AutoFormat As You Type tab and clear the check boxes for the first four entries–Straight quotes, ordinals, fractions, and hyphens. Then you can skip converting the document to text before emailing it.
    BTW your Web pages are fine. Just the emails are problematic.

  • Deb Miller

    I’m getting your emails from Feedblitz in Entourage on the Mac. I haven’t seen any strange characters. All seems to be fine with mine.

  • http://www.happiness-project.com Gretchen Rubin

    Hmmm….this is helpful. I don’t think the Word pasting issue is the problem, because I’ve had that before (!) and it showed up in the post itself.
    I think the problem lies in Feedblitz. Now I’m off to customer support.
    Many thanks for the help!

  • Mary B

    I don’t have a solution to the strange characters, but they have been happening to a number of the subject lines in the e-mails I receive, not just yours. It’s only started happening in the past two weeks or so. And it only seems to happen to mass mailings, not e-mails from friends.

  • Cathy C

    I get your posts in my email from Feedblitz. To date they have been perfectly normal, no weird characters. Interesting that some get them and some don’t.

  • Jaina

    It shows up fine in Google Reader, but it’s just a formatting problem. Sounds like you’re writing it in Word first, which replaces certain punctuations with other symbols when you paste it into a .txt format online.

  • http://www.slidesinaflash.com Saraj

    I read through Live Journal also and it looks the same as the Feedblitz excerpt above.

  • Rylyn

    My dad has been fwd your newsletters to me for several months. I have had the punctuation problem with every 2nd one since he started sending them to me. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day and keep up the great work you’re doing. It does help.

  • ellen

    Yes, I’m getting the weird punctuation…
    I use Safari. It seems to be a common problem, though, not limited to your site.

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