YouTube videos and *less* weird characters!
First, a nod to KISMIF for mentioning HalfEagle this week. Their post reminded me of two things; my plan to add greater control over what kind of Scouting information you see here and the annoying little rendering issues on HalfEagle.
As you can see in the screenshot at KISMIF, there are occasions where some rather odd “Å” characters creep into the HalfEagle home page. There’s a lot of different blog software, server types, and character encoding issues out there in the blogosphere and HalfEagle tries to do it’s best to minimize those issues. The good news? After a couple hours of wrangling, HalfEagle is doing a much better job of:
- Handling special characters
- Displaying foreign language characters (sometimes found in the google news/delicious section)
- Normalizing capitalization of blog titles
- Displaying quote characters
It’s awfully ugly when all these issues happen to crop up in the most recent items, but those days should mostly be over! 
While I was at it, I added a new feature. If you embed or link to a YouTube video in your blog post, HalfEagle will automatically pull a thumbnail of the video to use as your blog image. Let me know if you notice any issues with this new feature.
As far as adding greater control over what kind of Scouting information you see here, that will take more than a couple hours, so it’ll have to wait for a free weekend. 