MT Recent Entries Ecto Issue Solved

So, I was having a really annoying issue with Kung Log and Ecto where I couldn’t retrieve my recent entries. I was getting dropped a cryptic message that went something like this:

Response:
{
    "/FaultCode" = -65794;
    "/FaultExtra" = {
        domain = -1;
        error = -65795;
        msg = "U2020U00d9 (line 112, pos 40096, status 3)";
    };
    "/FaultString" = "/CFStreamFault";
    "/kWSHTTPResponseMessage" = <NSCFType: 0x5626e40; >
    "/kWSResultIsFault" = 1;
}

Not a whole lot to go on here. But after a little googling, and finding nothing, I thought I would start screwing around to see what I could find. So what I did, was go into the ecto prefs and change my recent entries retrieval from 20 to 5. Everything is fine. Okay, so I have some invalid character in one of my posts that is b0rking the parsing of the XML. So I start upping the retrieval limit until I found the bad post.

Turns out I had used a shift-opt-8 character combination for a degree symbol, which rendered fine on the web, but would kill Kung Logs XML-RPC handling when pulling back down from the server. I should have used “°” instead. I am stupid. Let this be a lesson kids, write valid markup.

What this brings about however is an interesting feature request for Ecto: an XHTML validator built in for checking code. It would be really nice to have copied URLs checked for invalid characters, and have ampersands and brackets automatically changed to their valid XHTML entities.

Update: Seems like it’s already built in, and you only get this error from doing a web based post with invalid characters. So I guess I should complain to the MT people heh. From the Ecto FAQ.

Listening To: “Lounge Against the Machine” by Richard Cheese