fixing the escape in the feed item content was easy: open and save the item. (don’t know why, but it worked.)
the title, however, is a different story. at first I thought it was a problem with the character set on the page that it’s being pulled into. (fyi, my home page is generated by running all the feeds generated by the programs I run through Magpie.) so I tried change the meta from iso-8891 or whatever to utf-8. no dice, at least not in Moz 1.4. (nor in IE5; I just checked. man, this site looks weird in IE.)
then I looked at the WP script that generates the Atom feed…it takes the character set for the XML from the one that’s set in the program. I haven’t tried tweaking that; we’ll see what happens then…I’d just as soon stay with utf-8, but it’s not as though I generally write in Korean or Japanese or anything. (or even with umlauts.)
no dice; suggestions welcome. (it’s possible that an upgrade to the latest version of Magpie will fix it, but since I’m using the same Magpie install to power Feed on Feeds, I’m nervous about upgrading. might try it anyway, though.)
no better luck with that, either, although happily upgrading from 0.6a to 0.6.1 doesn’t seem to actively break anything that was already working. I’ll just have to leave that for a conundrum for another day.