Corrections on Moblogging, Plus Good News on the R11B Patch

Hi folks -- Vish on the Journals team sent me a few clarifications (OK, corrections) about my entry on moblogging from yesterday:

* You can send video, not just pictures, from your cell phone to AOL Journals.
* You can post as many photos per entry as your camera will allow; they'll just post one after another in your entry.

I've updated the entry -- thanks to Vish for the corrections.

Good News on the R11B Patch: The Journals team pushed the Journals R11b patch fix to Beta last night; it is scheduled to get published live to production tonight, 5/31, at 12 midnight EDT.

In addition to some bug fixes and features for International users, the R11b patch restores the Classic, non-animated AOL Pictures embedded slideshows in your entries that were created before R11b went live (early morning May 16), which shows the captions you've added.

Since the embedded gallery display front end is just pulling from the AOL Pictures back end (which didn't change), your captions are safe and sound, and will show up after the install.

You can see an example in my Beta Journal right now -- check out my Postsecret entry from last year on Beta -- you'll see the pre-R11B embedded gallery, with captions intact.  (Remember, changes you make in your Beta Journal will not show up on your production Journal -- it's just for testing & messing around. So don't point people to your Beta Journal, and it's not a shortcut to midnight. Please just wait for the install.)

Now, remember, after the midnight install, all previously published albums albums created before R11b went live, May 16th, will go back to the old style.  Also after the install, you'll have the choice between the Classic (HTML) style, and the Animated (Flash) styles -- six of them, accessed through a drop-down menu, that will look like this (here's a side-by-side screenshot, comparing the two styles -- it will change depending on which radio button you pick, Classic or Animated):

You can see the new album styles chooser if you look at your Journal on the beta servers -- just add "beta." in front of your Journals URL -- that is, if my production Journal is at:

http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

My beta Journal will be at

http://beta.journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

Remember, only use your beta Journal for testing -- the beta and production Journals databases are not connected. The new embedded gallery behavior and chooser should be live for everyone Friday morning.

[Update: I took out a paragraph here about galleries created in the gap weeks between 5/16 and 5/31 -- they will stay animated until you change them, because changing them over to Classic style would involve changing some invisible flags in your entries, which was deemed overly risky. I will do a separate entry about this.]

Going forward, you'll just have to click that radio button to choose between animated and Classic styles -- and you can switch back and forth, too.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, moblogging, aol pictures, embedded slideshows, r11b, aol journals status