title: My jekyll site can't build: Liquid Exception: incompatible character encodings
body: <p>I do not know what I changed, but today I can no longer build my site's front page with jekyll successfully.  It is now complaining about:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[2012-10-30 14:22:10] regeneration: 1 files changed
  Liquid Exception: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT in index.html
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I'm at a loss to resolve the issue.  I believe it's being introduced via a loop of posts I create on the front page, index.html, where I include an excerpt from the last 'n' posts. I used file(1) against my _posts/ directory, and do have some mixture in there:</p>
  
  <pre><code>_posts/2012-08-10-canned-responses-your-silent-partner.md:    UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines
  _posts/2012-08-21-alternate-ssh-for-osx.md:                   UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines
  _posts/2012-08-21-appus-interruptus.md:                       ASCII English text
  _posts/2012-10-25-emoryfocuslight.md:                         ASCII English text
  _posts/2012-10-28-distributed-social-networking-with-tent.md: ASCII English text, with very long lines
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if this is my problem, though. I use vim and bbedit to edit these files, and they're stored in Dropbox (I build/stage in my Dropbox folder but publish elsewhere). Most of my writing/editing is done on OS X.</p>
  
  <p>When I search for this error message I get a lot of hits for rails applications or forcing ruby gems to use a specific encoding, I don't know if that is relevant or would even help me.  Would love to be aimed in the right direction or be told how to resolve this situation.  It's a sad state of affairs!</p>