Pipes has had a problem handling certain character sets in various feeds and XML documents. The good news is that we believe we’ve finally isolated the issue and the release today should solve the mangling problem for a majority of feeds in our system. If you are using the http://william.cswiz.org/tool/xmliconv/ hack, you can still continue to use it, but you should be able to fetch the feeds directly now.
We also fixed the pubDate on our output. We will display the 4 digits of the year (2008) vs. the 2 digits (08).
