phonoloblog, character coding rants

[trochee]

I'm pleased to see that Eric Bakovic has started a new phonology blog phonoloblog.

It shows promise, already gathering a growing collection of interesting semi-political commentary on the DNC. It's definitely worth a read. I'm also very pleased to see that it's published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. I look forward to tracking this blog, although it seems to have some technical growing pains right now (The RSS feed for phonoloblog (... there, now syndicated at phonoloblog) seems to be broken; it returns ill-formed XML has been fixed, and there's no helpful way to make comments other than signing up for an account of one's own).**

There's a nice post about [fǝˌnɛɾɪktɹænˈskɹɪpʃn̩] on the web. He writes:

It seems to me that what we need is one or more of the following, in ascending order of preference:

• Someone to edit the html ASCII code page to make it more useful for us phonologists.
• Someone to find a page in which the above has already been done.
• Someone to suggest and/or provide something better than having to type in (or copy-and-paste) ASCII codes for this purpose.

I’d also like someone to help me locate the ASCII code for IPA secondary stress, if it even exists … I ended up having to transcribe two primary stresses in this post’s title because I couldn’t find the secondary stress code.

My quibbles and comments:

• ASCII is a very old code. Its best descendant is Unicode character encoding, which is what's actually recorded on that "ASCII test page" you publish, and I'm sure you meant that instead. The Unicode and HTML guide is handy here.
• The amazing Wikipedia also has "the page in which the above has already been done": IPA in Unicode.
• Modifier Letter Low Vertical Line is I think what you're looking for in annotating secondary stress. It's u+02cc; I've used it in UTF-8 above in the link to your article on this subject.
• A page with lots of detail on the "funny characters" is here, for example the IPA Extensions. Here is the entry for LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA (ə).

**UPDATED: tech issues: The XML failure in the RSS feed is probably a Movable Type bug; Mozilla's XML verification says that the title isn't legal:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/wp-rss2.php
Line Number 75, Column 136:
		<title>[&#102;&#477;&#737;&#110;&#603;&#638;&#618;&#107;&#116;&#633;&#230;&#110;&#737;&#115;&#107;&#633;&#618;&#112;&#643;&#110;&#809]</title>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^

This seems to be pointing to the ʃ in [fǝˡnɛɾɪktɹænˡskɹɪpʃn̩], but it might be the syllabic modifier character on the n. Anybody know enough about Movable Type WordPress to help him out? SECOND UPDATE: looks like it's been fixed now, by removal of the IPA from the title.
(I'd try to track back to Bakovic's article, but I don't have the tech skills for that.)