So you've written your new tag-laden, buzzword-compliant, social-network-growing Web 2.0 application, launched it, and now you find that your Brazilian users are having trouble with those funny characters in their names, and you're really up a creek with that Japanese user base you didn't expect.

What did you miss? As it turns out, very little -- MySQL provides excellent (and improving) support for a wide variety of character encodings, and it is surprisingly easy to get it to work with PHP and web applications.

But it can sneak up on you if you don't know the basics, and that's what this session will cover, from dealing with character encodings on the Web, even when others are getting them wrong, to planning for your site's eventual translation into Khmer.