As mentioned at the Council meeting, the VLA blog feeds were irroneously displaying odd characters. Those early viewers/testers of the VLA prototype pages saw blog feeds where quotes and other punctuation marks were replaced by question marks or other strange characters. Of course this made the feeds difficult to read and frustrated the webmaster.
The explanation is a bit more than we can write here, but it has to do with the charcter sets used to display web content. Most web pages by default, use what is known as ISO-8559-1 or Lat1n-1 sets of charcters. Many publishing systems, or content pasted from software such as MS Word, introduce certain characters (curly quotes, em-dashes) that are not part of the ISO-8559-1 character set, and thus it substitutes other characters, which look like gibberish.
However, there is a web chcaracter set called UTF-8 that can properly display these characters. To make a long story shorter — UTF-8 is now enabled on the VLA prototype pages so characters display correctly in the blog feeds.