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This will only be interesting to people posting here (unless someone wants to tell me how other blogging software deals with this issue.)
[update: sorry had an error in the block quote. Fixed now.]
HTML entites:
Character entity references, or entities for short, provide a method of entering characters that cannot be expressed in the document's character encoding or that cannot easily be entered on a keyboard. Entities are case-sensitive and take the form &name;. Examples of entities include © for the copyright symbol and Α for the Greek capital letter alpha.These are useful. Here's a list of Latin-1 entites. Here's a list for symbols and greek characters. Here's a list for special entites. In those lists you should be looking at the two 'entity' columns (the first is what you put in your post, the second is the character that will result when viewed in a web browser.)
Great. The problem is if you use HTML entites in a post, and then go back to edit the post, when the system puts the entity into the editing text box in your browser, it displays the entity, not the code for the entity. In other words if you make a post with > your post will display the greater than symbol: >. But when you go back to edit, instead of seeing > in the editing box, you'll just see > which isn't what you want (because you'd have to change it by hand back to >)
I wonder if that's clear? Anyway, the work around for this is non standard, but will work on all pages here: insert an underscore after the ampersand. So instead of © to make a copyright symbol, you should use &_copy;
Thanks to Bruno for finding some problems in my first implementation of this.