strange characters on web page

I have a graffiti blog and i have a strange problem which is showing strange ch开发者_StackOverflowar page like this:

alt text http://amrelgarhy.com/ScreenShots/error.jpg

This page was showing when I opened my control panel admin page. It's also showing the same when I try to edit one of my previous posts. My problem is that i don't know what's the reason behind it.

I am not sure how to fix this. All my posts are in English and I always use Windows Live Writer to post.

Has anyone faced a problem like this before? Can you advise me on finding the cause of this problem, and any potential solution?

Looks like it might be an encoding mismatch. Are you opening UTF-8 (or some other Unicode)-encoded files in a tool that doesn't understand UTF encodings or vice-versa?

Try placing this in your master page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Also, check that a virtual directory has been created.

There seems to be a problem with the content MIME-types. The weirdness you are seeing happens because the server offers content as binary (I'm guessing application/octet-stream) even though it should offer them as text/html. Images should be offered as image/<extension>, for example image/png.

You can manually set MIME-type handlers to certain filetypes. If you are using Apache, you could easily to this in a .htaccess file like this:

AddType text/html .html

If your content is something else than HTML the MIME-type is something different. If your web-server doesn't automatically do this you should probably add the handlers yourself.

All MIME-types can be found from here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/