More on the Public List Page & Error Messages

I forgot to mention something else cool when I wrote about the Public List page -- if you make a mistake and typo the title part of a Journal's address, instead of giving the previous very unhelpful, scary and misleading "AOL Journals is unavailable" blue screen error message, you will get the public list page, showing the Journals under that screen name.

For example, this is what you get when you try to go to this incorrect, typoed URL for my blog: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsomek --

It's a lot more useful than the old error screen, which was not only a dead end, but it was misleading, because it said "please try again" -- if you had typed an incorrect address, no amount of trying again would have helped.

Also, now, if you mistype the screen name, you'll get a search box so you can try searching by screen name:

The Journals product folks are working on cleaning up our error message pages to make them more useful, but for now, there are still a few instances where you will see the old, unhelpful blue error pages. If this happens (and Journals isn't actually down), try going to that Journal's main page and look from there, or use one of the searches.

Also, unfortunately, the Public List page wasn't fully implemented for International Journalers, though we took out the old error page. This means if you typo a Journal title for a non-US Journal, you will get a funny looking error page; it's pretty much broken, though the net effect is the same as it was with the earlier error page.

International Journals are behind on a bunch of features and fixes, though they should get a bunch of these in the next release, which should happen next month.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: AOL Journals