It’s enough to drive you squirrelly.

My good friend zuzus-petals is experiencing a frustrating problem, one that I experience also, regarding punctuation symbols in diary entries. I used to use regular Apple keyboard key combinations to make my apostrophes (opt-sh-]) and quotation marks (opt-[ and opt-sh-[ respectively) and they worked fine, up until about a year ago. Then they were turning into nonsense. ’ became ì for example, and quotes were Ó and Ò or some such gobbledygook. I eventually got around this problem by bookmarking a HTML shortcuts site and consulting it every time I needed to put accents in French text.

This works great over at Xanga where the editor retains your text as you entered it when you go back to make changes later. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen here at Diaryland. Sadly, if you should navigate away from the editor while you are in the process of using it, or if you should reopen it in the event you want to make corrections or additions to an entry after it has been posted, all those tags have turned into the correct symbols and, when resubmitted, turn back into the very garbage you were trying to avoid in the first place unless they are put back in again as tags.

This is a royal pain in the butt.

Zuzu has tried to get the powers-that-be to fix this, but to no avail. Maybe it’s time for an email campaign to get him to address some of these very real and discouraging drawbacks to this site. It would also be nice to have an html preview button (as they have at Xanga) so that you could see what your text looks like before you submit it. It’s really useful for people who actually like to proofread (ahem).

So, if others of you are having these same problems, get on it. Either email [email protected] or [email protected], especially if you’re a gold member. Money talks.

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However, that wasn’t what I originally wanted to write about when I logged in here today. I chanced to look out the kitchen window and saw the squirrel had accessed the bird feeder, probably by scampering very carefully along the clothesline from the post. I ran upstairs and grabbed my digital camera and shot a couple of photos before he buggered off.

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