First - my very special thanks to @sod who through the help account has been helping me understand so much about micro.blog on my journey to totally restyling my blog running on micro.blog. Will not go through the history here - but bit by bit we have been advancing.
Suffice to say I decided to bite the bullet after seeing something from Manton where he said that Hugo 0.158 was working well for him and my take (could be wrong) that anyone using it would see a substantial performance improvement.
My blog is large and in maintenance is very very slow, so I was taken and started.
Lots of problems - that I fixed and Sven helped me with - ending up changing the base theme, removing my design and implementing ‘Vanilla Sumo’. Still had problems - some of which I resolved by removing a specific plugin - and this morning - all was working - except the emojis.
As of this morning - I gave up. I rolled the 0.158 Hugo back to 0.91 and fixed. So I will stop pursuing this until 0.158 is the ‘recommended’ version.
If anyone has interest in the precise problem - read on.
This is working now - under 0.91
Go to https://john.philpin.com and click on the date of any post - say …
[This one]( John PHI⑊PIN )
Notice at the end of the post there is a line that reads : ‘Filed In … and depending where you are will list the categories - that in the case of this post is 
WWW and 
Asides
Click into one of those - say ‘asides’
and you arrive at this page - emojis showing nicely - including in the page title.
All is well - all is good - all as it should be.
This is dashboard version of one of those categories - taken when still under 0.158
I see the same in 0.91 - BUT
The thing is that on the actual site under 0.158 the emojis on the web site are often seen as ‘?’ and the URL seems to end up with an unexplained dash - so rather than say
/categories/asides/ I end up with /categories/-asides/
My chats with Gemini suggested that the emojis MIGHT be a Unicode issue - since what I described above wasn’t on all emojis - but Gemini saw a pattern that the fails -
1. Database Encoding (The Most Likely Culprit)
If this is a MySQL or MariaDB database, the database tables are likely set to
utf8. Despite the name, MySQL’s legacyutf8only supports 3-byte characters.
- The Fix: The database and tables need to be converted to
utf8mb4(UTF-8 Multibyte 4), which was specifically created to support modern 4-byte characters like emojis.2. Meta Tags
Ensure the header of the webpage file contains the proper charset declaration so the browser knows how to read it:
.. but as for the ‘-’ - do not know.
Me? No idea. I also do not know if this issue is Sumo or Micro.Blog.
So rolling back and getting back to what I was orginally trying to do.
IF anybody is interested in bottoming this out - more than happy to help and test - but decided that with an elapsed time of well over a week trying to fix this - time to move on.
I know I am an edge case -
- not technical
- large blog
- pushing use of emoji
… and don’t want to spend nay more time on it - unless someone else wants to explore.
IMPORTANT - not a waste of time
- learnt a lot
- discovered some unseen breakages inside my blog - now fixed
- feeling a lot more confident about doing even more
ONWARDS.