Japanese Language Blogging

A friend in Japan asked me what I thought about the future of blogging in Japan. I thought about it for around 5 seconds and suddenly realized that I don’t know if Movable Type, or any blog software supports Japanese language encodings. So now I’m curious, I have to find out.

Movable Type runs in Perl, and there is a Perl extension for Japanese language encodings, so it should be possible to add Japanese support to MT, if it isn’t in there already. I know the RSS XML specs have a language tag, but some blog programs (like the notoriously buggy Radio ) can’t handle anything but ASCII.

So I must do some experiments. I really should set up a Japanese language blog on this server, but there are a few major maintenance tasks I should do first. I can’t do an experiment without taking everything apart and putting it back together properly. And this blog sure isn’t put together properly. I have a feeling this is going to all blow up in my face.

Update: I found a few Movable Type blogs in Japanese, they’re using UTF-8. Looks like only a few minor changes to the page templates to add the encoding flags, and it’s all set. The RSS feed even works in Amphetadesk/Mozilla, it decodes and displays nicely. It works!

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