This blog has now been successfully converted to the UTF-8 character encoding. This enables using non-western characters in any part of this site.

НЕ РЛОХО!

This was all made possible using Torben's handy MidCOM UTF-8 HOWTO. Please report if you note any issues.

Note: Newsticker's MetaWebLog API support doesn't seem to work 100% reliably on UTF-8. ecto seems to support it fine, but MarsEdit reports XML parsing problems when fetching the latest entries.
I've now posted a bug to the MarsEdit issue tracker, but frankly I suspect this is an issue with either the PEAR XML-RPC library or my MetaWebLog implementation.

Updated 2004-09-29: The issue with blogging tools was resolved by commenting out the following lines in Apache configuration:

#   php_value default_charset UTF-8
#   php_value mbstring.func_overload 7
#   php_value mbstring.internal_encoding UTF-8
#   php_value mbstring.detect_order UTF-8

Torben has told me to use these lines in his HOWTO, but as suggested by Piotras, they are not necessary for correct usage of Midgard with UTF-8. In addition, not using them resolves the MetaWebLog API problem.