Coming Soon: Journals Public List Page and More

Hi folks -- so, Journals
Product Manager Susan says that this morning's install (which
I
mentioned yesterday) went pretty smoothly, so we're all clear
for tomorrow morning's install of the Journals R5
Release.

Here's
Susan's entry on what's coming in R5.

In
short, there's a lot of back-end and
infrastructure work to fix bugs
that you might not have noticed but that still caused problems, as well
as work that supports upcoming cool stuff like
mobile blogging (moblogging), video
and more (things that we've been talking about for a while,
but we're getting close, honest).

Also, something
you've been asking for for a while -- the "All About Me"
character limit is going from 1,000
characters to 25,000 characters, so you'll
have a lot more room to play around with.

(I'm sorry
it took so long, but it wasn't just a matter of changing a number from
"1" to "25" -- the tech folks had to go in and do whatever
database voodoo it is that they do. They'd actually
been running into some problems, but I think they've got it ready for install.)

The other major change you'll see is the
Journals Public List Page -- as the name suggests,
it's a page that will list all of your publically available Journals
for a particular screen name. Here's how it's going to
work:

Now, the way AOL Journals addresses (URLs) are
set up, they go like this: http://journals.aol.com/SCREEN_NAME/JOURNAL_TITLE (so my Journal's URL is
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/).

Before,
if you went to http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/, you would get
the usual blue "Not Found" error page.

With
yesterday's install, they started doing some work to prepare for the
Public List page. Right now, if you go to
http://journals.aol.com/SCREEN_NAME/ (where you replace SCREEN_NAME
with the screen name you're currently logged in with), you will see a
page that looks kind of like this (only it will show your own
Journals):

This
is NOT the Public List Page!

This page is
kind of a glitch page; it was live but never really
used -- you could previously only get to it by accident; usually by
typing any non-supported character in a Journal URL (for example, try:
http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/byt^heway).

It's
kind of ugly, and it has some information that isn't
really useful to people (do you really need to
know your locale is "en-US"?).

What
is going live with R5 is the Journals
Public List Page, which you can see in beta right now. I will
use myself as an example: beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/
--

That's the owner's
view of the Public list page. It shows me all the Journals I
have, both public and private, that I have under my JournalsEditor
screen name. In some ways, it's like the widget (remember Myrtle?)
on the Journals main
page.

In addition, if
someone else goes to http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/
(and eventually, journals.aol.com/journalseditor after R5 goes live),
they will see all of my public Journals (I only have the one there,
Magic Smoke) and only the private Journals that
they're allowed to read (because they're on the
roster.)

For example, if any of you folks go to
http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/,
you should only see this:

So, you're not going to be able to
see my test blogs, which are private.

The Public
List Page is just a neat little extra that will help you see people's
publicly available Journals. It was done to support other work, but I
think it will be pretty useful by itself.

Thanks
--Joe