title: Changing MySQL from latin1 encoding to UTF-8
body: <p>I recently realized that I made a big mistake and encoded things on the front end in UTF-8 and on the DB side to latin1.</p>
  
  <p>I am thinking to switch my MySQL db to UTF-8.  Is there a "good practice" of doing such a procedure?  Any recommended steps I can take?  What are the pitfalls I should watch out for?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you,
  Alex</p>