Memeflow and Internationalization

While I was implementing the GoTo service I always had internationalization in the back of my mind, but I am by no means an expert on the subject (even though I subscribe to, and regularly read, Michael Kaplan). I made sure everything was utf-8 end to end and did all the right sort of development things and kind of hoped for the best…

I am by no means a language expert and being a one man band had no test resources¹. I cut and pasted some text from Japanese sites, linked to some and all seemed to be well. So I was very happy to see some (what I think are) reviews of the service on websites that I cannot read. For example, here’s one².

It looked like everything was working fine.

Then today I received an email from someone who doesn’t have good English (his words, not mine), asking for help as he could not log in.

Uhh Ohh.

One issue that the service has is that it authenticates the XML response from the server with every transaction. If the XML is malformed, then the authentication doesn’t work and you are effectively locked out. I suspected that this is what had happened.

So I looked at the database, and sure enough his last entry had had the title automatically filled in by a background job that scans the web pages for newly added sites. This code had an internationalization bug in it.

I fixed the bug; nuked the title; re-ran the title scan, and hey presto, he can log in.

¹ If non-English readers could confirm/deny that things are working well for them, I’d appreciate it!

² If someone could translate this site for me, I’d appreciate that too!