Gundamaniac

Ever since the forced upgrade by wordpress, the RSS feedlist plugin on my wordpress blog has been acting funny. folks who often visit this blog might have noticed the syndicated blog entries from Danny’s site would often bleed out codes right out unto the sidebar.  this has been a source of countless mind numbing attempts of php code reading, and plugin testing. It wasn’t until I noticed that the RSS feedlist wasn’t allowing any Japanese blog feed, did I found out that I was in fact looking at it from the wrong direction. the problem wasn’t the plugin, it was because wordpress had trouble reading Japanese characters. apparently some idiot developer set the default for the wordpress SQL database to Swedish instead of UTF-8. For folks using wordpress and having problems with other languages, this might be the remedy for your woes. The solution, click on over to your phpMyAdmin from the Cpanel and change the database collation set in ”latin1_swedish_ci” to “utf8_unicode_ci“.
original “how-to” step by step guide from Japan it UP! 

1. Back up your database. by using the backup wizard on Cpanel
2. click on phpMyAdmin
3. Choose your database on the left
4. Under your database on the left, click on the first table available (mine would be wp_categories)
5. On the right you’ll see Field, Type, Collation, Attributes, etc.
6. For the Fields that have Collation set as something other than utf8_unicode_ci you should tick the check box.
7. After you ticked all check boxes in that table, click the pencil icon at the bottom (When you mouse over it there should be a tool tip that says “change”). When you click this you can edit those fields.
8. Using the drop down box on each field you can now change the Collation with entries set to latin1_swedish_ci to the bottom selection in the drop down box which is utf8_unicode_ci.
9. Hit Save
10. Click on the next table and repeat steps 5-10  for each table.