Journals Release R6 Is Coming

Okay, folks, here's the news: As Journals Project Manager Yoel writes in his blog, The Daily Grind, Journals Release R6 is approaching. It's currently scheduled for early next week; we'll give you the exact date when it's nailed down.

Like I've said before, the Journals team is using agile development methods, which means smaller releases every 4-8 weeks, instead of just one big release a year. The original schedule was to launch R6 at the end of May, but due to, well, life, the date was moved.

Also, we won't be getting some features we were trying to get this time around (like the free-form mood entry field), but we'll get to those in a later release.

Here are some of the key things that will happen with R6:

• Journals Search Improvements: We're adding a Search box to the Journals header that will allow you to search just your Journal, or all Journals. Here's a mockup:
  
  
  (It's not going to be black-and-white, and that jagged gap is just a cutout so I could fit it in a reasonable width.)
  
  
• HTML Whitelist: We'll be updating the HTML whitelist, which means that you'll be able to include more content from other Web sites using IFRAMEs (IFRAMEs are kind of a window "cut" into your blog, that shows content from another Web page).
  
  Also, you'll be able to use some Javascript from whitelisted Web sites. We'll need to provide more details on how to do this.
  
  
• Table Tags: You'll be able to use HTML table tags in your Journal entries, so you can do fancy layouts and/or real damage to your blog. (I'm being glib, but you do need to be careful when working with HTML table tags, because mistakes can cause unintended things to happen to your page's layout.)
  
  
• Ad Banners in International Journals: I know how popular this one is going to be, but at the request of the International Journals business teams, ad banners will be added to all International Journals -- that means Canada, UK, France, Germany and Mexico.
  
  Project Manager Yoel has posted more information about International ad banners in his blog.
  
  
• Moblogging Beta: Moblogging is the ability to post to your blog remotely, away from your computer. This includes posting photos to your blog from your cell phone. This is done by using a special e-mail address that you send your posts to.
  
  Moblogging has been in kind of a stealth beta, but with R6, the interface will be cleaned up enough so that people can play with it on the Journals Beta.
  
  You get to the Journals Beta by putting "beta." at the front of your Journal's address -- for example, my blog's address is: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/
  The beta version is http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/
  
  The moblogging beta is also kind of a back door into group blogging, too, but we'll get to that later.
  
  
• Tagging Beta: I wrote about the tagging beta back in April -- it's a way to tag your entries (again, in beta), which is a way for you to self-categorize your entries. The current beta doesn't support Microsoft's Internet Explorer Browser, which is the browser that comes in the AOL software, so it wasn't particularly useful to most Journalers. With R6, you'll be able to play with tagging on the Journals beta.
  

In addition to all this, there will be bug fixes, as well as work done on the back end to make it even easier for search engines to find your blog content, and other infrastructure work that you probably won't notice.

We'll have more details on the timing of the launch soon. In the meantime, I and others will be working on ways to explain, demonstrate, and tutorialize the new stuff you'll be able to do with R6.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: AOL Journals, AOL Journals Status, Journals R6