Microsoft moves Blogs to WordPress

At the TechCrunch Disrupt event today, Twitter user, @bigs, broke the news that Microsoft announced that it would be moving over 30 million users of their Live blogging service to WordPress.

As a WordPress expert that has had to work on WordPress in a Windows environment there is one big gotcha: character encoding.

Here are what common characters look like when they are moved from a Windows environment to WordPress:

a return: ^M
single-quotes: ?~@~Y
asterisk: ?~@?
double-quotes: ?~@~\ or ?~@~]

If the WordPress migration process is robust, then it will translate these characters correctly into UTF-8 or something friendly like that.

Live users will definitely welcome the link schema and permalinks on WordPress. Instead of

http://cid-d4909e7f27e254e9.profile.live.com/

a user will get

http://barce.wordpress.com/ .

Also WordPress users can now link their accounts to MSN Messenger so that they can update their MSN friends or co-workers.

Are you a Windows Live Blogging user? How’d your upgrade process go?

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