Status of R6 Fixes (AOL Pictures and Double Quotes)

Hi folks -- here's the current status of our open items from the Journals R6 Release:

* AOL Pictures/YGP Fix for AOL UK and France Journalers -- the AOL Pictures integration with AOL Journals broke when R6 was installed. The fix for this will be installed tonight -- scratch that, it was just installed-- it was a "rolling bounce", so there weren't be any widespread outages.

If you are an AOL UK or France Journaler and you were having problems with AOL Pictures, please try giving it another shot.

* Double Quotes Breaking Journals Descriptions: This is the problem I mentioned previously where using double quotes and line breaks in your Journal's description would cause a duplicate chunk of text to show up in your blog's header. The fix for this will be installed during the day tomorrow (Wednesday).

You might not think this is a huge deal, especially since there's a workaround for the problem (use single quotes instead of double quotes); however, it's a priority fix for the Journals team because this problem has other potential impacts.

* Journals Main Page Design Tweaks: This is not, strictly speaking, part of the Journals R6 release (actually, it has nothing to do with R6), but we decided that now would be a good chance to clean up the look of the Journals main page (http://peopleconnection.aol.com/journals), which was starting to develop gaps and holes in the layout. (My fault, of course.)

We pretty much just re-arranged the elements of the page to make them fit better. The main Dynamic Lead promo area now uses Flash, which is not my favorite thing but it seems to work.

Also, we're currently featuring the feeds from three Editors' Blogs in the tabbed module directly below the Journals widget.

In addition, we've got a Featured Member Feed in the lower right section of the page -- the feed module pulls headlines directly from your blog's RSS or Atom Feed. As noted, we're trying to find new ways to feature more of your publicly-available Journals content, and using Feed display modules is just one way to do that.

There are also a few other single-column modules at the bottom of the page that we will be using to feature various items, including member Journals, news and items from the big ole sphere o' blogs, Journals-related features and tips, etc.

Plus, the page now has some room to grow vertically, whereas before it was getting to be very uneven.

Because the page is modular and easy to update, we will be playing around with different layouts to suit the programming features and content that we're trying to cover.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: AOL Journals, AOL Journals Status