WordPress came out with version 4.2.1 today to address a security issue. I have thus updated my blog to that version. I have also made a couple other changes.

First, Version 4.2 introduced this Emoji stuff which I didn’t really care for and it broke some of my smileys in older posts, namely the “confused” one: 😕 (or

as one of the textual representations). It came across as an unrendered character on my system instead of the smiley image icon_confused.gif. I found a new plugin called Classic Smilies which removes the Emoji CSS and JS from loading and restores the older images.

Second, I decided to change the character set in my blog’s MySQL database from latin1 to utf8 which has been the default for some time. When I started my blog, latin1 was the default. I found Fixing a MySQL Character Encoding Mismatch and followed it. Here’s what I did:

1. I used SQLyog, which I bought a long time ago, to first backup the database to another database and then to dump the original database as a SQL file.
2. Edited the SQL file and changed all the CHARACTER SET= latin1 and CHARSET=latin1 statements to utf8 instead.
3. Emptied the database to remove all tables and data.
4. Altered the database to make the default charset utf8.
5. Restored the database from the edited SQL file.

Now, all the fields in the database have a charset of utf8 and collation of utf8_general_ci. So far everything looks normal. I actually converted the database before updating to 4.2.1. 🙂