One of the main issues that some people have been having with the FriendFeed Comments Plugin is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, it will fail to match up a post with the information from FriendFeed.  There are a couple of reasons why this does happen, but the problems all centre around the fact that I have to use the post title to match up the details because there’s no other uniquely identifiable piece of information available.

This is of course a problem when people edit the title, either due to a typo or a editorial change.  Also there seems to be some string encoding issues, especially around the 32,000 different characters that can render to look like an apostrophe.    I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to strip out the special characters and normalise the titles so I can be sure of getting a match between what’s on the blog & what’s coming back from the FriendFeed API.  I even tried just stripping out non-alphanumeric characters, but then I had a complaint from an amazingly patient person who’s site was using Cyrillic.  So what I’ve got now is a rather hodgepodge solution where it tries to strip out as many characters as possible, then does an md5 hash on that to use as the id, and some people are still having issues where, for no apparent reason, the posts won’t match up.

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