Observations About Photos in Alerts

The results are in and they're
overwhelming -- for the most part, you guys love photos appearing
in your Alerts. I am well aware that some of you don't like this,
too -- but the majority of the responses have been very positive.

I have to
admit that that feature caught us by surprise, too. We in Journals weren't
planning on it happening, but it seems like a happy accident.


I have to offer this word of
caution, though: We have not spoken to the Alerts team yet to see
if their servers can handle the additional load that comes from transmitting
photos with each Alert. If that becomes a problem, unfortunately, we'll have to
pull the feature.

I hate to rain on the parade, but I just
want to manage your expectations here.

I've been playing
with the photos in Alerts in my test Journal, and observed a few things. Check
this out:

Many of you like your photos to appear in your
Alerts. To guarantee that, make your photo the very first thing in
your Journal entry. When your photo is the very first thing in
your entry, your IM alert looks like this:

Some of you like the excerpted text of your journal entry
to appear in the alert, enticing readers with the power of your words and saving
photos for later. That's fine, too. There is a finite amount of space in each
Alert, see, so any text pushes the photo down further and
further. If you want to tease readers with words and part of a
photo, you could try an approach similar to this one:

Please note that an emailed Alert allows for
much more space than an IM Alert, so it will take much more text
to make a photo completely vanish. The screen cap below is the email version of
the above screen cap -- notice how much more space there is to work
with.

If you have any other issues or observations, please let me
know.