So just as I was buying champagne for my validation party, Albert Banks’s Netflix plugin for WordPress broke my website. Well, not really–it just introduced a small, annoying error that I’ll have to fix somehow: any “&” symbols that are rendered through the plugin (for example, the one in Romance & Cigarettes, which I have at home right now) don’t get converted to the correct character entity.

XHTML 1.0 assumes that every instance of the “&” symbol is the beginning of a charcter entity, and it gets cranky when it’s not followed by a valid reference and a semicolon (like this: &) . Even in alt tags and URL strings.

Not a big deal, really. And it’s something I might not have even noticed if I hadn’t had that particular movie at home right now. Some quick PHP changes should fix ‘er up.