strange characters on web page

Question

I have a graffiti blog and i have a strange problem which is showing strange char page like this:

This page was showing when I opened my control panel admin page. It's also showing the same when I try to edit one of my previous posts. My problem is that i don't know what's the reason behind it.

I am not sure how to fix this. All my posts are in English and I always use Windows Live Writer to post.

Has anyone faced a problem like this before? Can you advise me on finding the cause of this problem, and any potential solution?

Answer 1

Looks like it might be an encoding mismatch. Are you opening UTF-8 (or some other Unicode)-encoded files in a tool that doesn't understand UTF encodings or vice-versa?

Answer 2

Try placing this in your master page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Also, check that a virtual directory has been created.

Answer 3

There seems to be a problem with the content MIME-types. The weirdness you are seeing happens because the server offers content as binary (I'm guessing application/octet-stream) even though it should offer them as text/html. Images should be offered as image/<extension>, for example image/png.

You can manually set MIME-type handlers to certain filetypes. If you are using Apache, you could easily to this in a .htaccess file like this:

AddType text/html .html

If your content is something else than HTML the MIME-type is something different. If your web-server doesn't automatically do this you should probably add the handlers yourself.

All MIME-types can be found from here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/