Management

So, if you're sick of seeing photos of me (and who isn't?), Journals Tech Product Manager Yoel [Update: oops, I meant Tech Project Manager -- there is a difference. Don't ask me what it is, though.] is in town for some meetings -- in addition to Journals, he works on Feeds and Favorites, so he's a popular guy.

I just snapped of photo of him and Journals Product Manager Susan together [Update: Susan asked me to leave her out of this wacky entry business, so I've updated the photo]

I was sitting down in my chair, which is why Yoel seems to be looming over the camera.

Looking over at Yoel's blog, I see that he's got a little feed icon icon in his All About Me area ( ) so that people visiting his blog can easily add his blog's feed to their My AOL page.

I'm going to be talking more about Feeds soon. Feeds sound a lot more complicated than they actually are -- it's just another way to read people's blogs.

When you subscribe to a blog's feed, you can see a summary of its entries (or the full text, depending on how it's set up) in a a custom Web page (like My AOL, My Yahoo, My Google, etc) or a program called an RSS reader (or feedreader).

If you read a lot of blogs, it can be a lot more convenient to use a feedreader to keep track of new entries.

Anyway, we're trying to figure out ways to make it easier for people to subscribe to your blog's feed (no point in making it hard for people to read your blog), without having to cover the page in these little icons.

In the meantime, I'm going to steal Yoel's My AOL icon. If you'd like to use it, just modify the code below with your blog's URL -- just replace the red bolded part below with your blog's URL (please note that capitalization counts when it comes to Journals addresses, so it's usually better to copy-and-paste) and put it in your All About Me area:

<A href="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/">
<IMG alt="Add to My AOL" src="http://myfeeds.aolcdn.com/vis/myaol_cta1.gif" border=0></A>

[Update, 1/20: Blogger Steven points out that the easier way to get the code for your button is to use the button generator at http://feeds.my.aol.com/button.jsp.]

With regards to doing this:
* Whenever you're pasting HTML code, make sure the formatting toolbar says "HTML", not "Text"
* I am still pushing to get an increase in the All About Me character limit in an upcoming release, though I don't have a timeline yet. Until then, if you're up against your character limit, take a look at your All About Me area in the HTML view -- sometimes there are extra spaces, or other funky characters that you can take out, if you need to squeeze out a few more characters.

Thanks -- Joe