My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time. The most common is the seemingly random appearance of  characters in the midst of some of my posts.
I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch. I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted. Until today… I hope
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…