New stories list on main page

[curious_guy (imported)]

For the last few days, when I go to the main page of the archive, under "New Stories" it says: "No items available". When I look at the story page I see that there are 11 new stories in the last 7 days.

Is anyone else seeing "No items available"?

[Buzz1221 (imported)]

Yes, I've been seeing only that for about a week or so.

[Paolo]

That's because some joker used a freaky character set in his title, which while it displayed on my end properly, played hell with the RSS feed that runs that new list. IE is aware of it and trying to fix it.

[curious_guy (imported)]

Just so you know, it is happening again.

[DeaconBlues (imported)]

Yep, it's happening again... I thought I was the only one who had the problem.

[Paolo]

That's because some joker used a freaky character set in his title, which while it displayed on my end properly, played hell with the RSS feed that runs that new list. IE is aware of it and trying to fix it.

[BossTamsin (imported)]

It's been fixed. The problem was that the script converting story information to an RSS feed is entirely homebrew, and I'm not exactly an expert in PHP. So, it sometimes chokes on special characters, rather than properly converting them. ( & to & for example) When that happens, it requires a manual intervention. Considering I wrote it myself, I'm impressed it works as often as it does. Heh.