Journals R11b Status Update: Displayed Screen Names, Hot Pink and More

Hi folks -- here's a couple of update on some issues identified yesterday from the Journals R11b release. (Sorry, it's really too noisy around my pod during the day to record video):

* Display Names in Comments and Entries -- Fixed: We had a bug where some people who posted blog comments and blog entries were having their first names show up instead of their screen names. The team installed a patch late last night that fixed this.

Why did this happen? We didn't account for a group of people who had customized their Welcome Screens by doing this:

* Inside the AOL software, going to AOL Keyword: Change My Welcome Screen [AOL in-client link] ...

... and changing it to show a name different from your Screen Name (say, "Funky Chicken") on the Welcome Screen, like this:

"Good Afternoon Funky Chicken"

The Journals comments and entry author field picked up on this display name and showed it (though if you noticed, in your Alert mails, it had the author's screen name, not display name.)

(I think this Welcome Screen display name option is an older feature that they don't highlight much any more: here's the help doc about it.)

Although it's not a huge deal, it was an unexpected behavior change; also, there was some potential for mischief (you could appear, at first glance, to be posting comments from someone else's Screen Name, though looking at the underlying hyperlink address would show who really posted it). So we fixed it -- comments and entries should now be showing screen names again.

Thanks to Mary and Nightmaremom for pointing this out -- it was very helpful and probably saved us some time and consternation.

* Updated Font Color Picker: I got a complaint that the hot pink color was missing from the font color picker in the editing toolbar for entries. I checked with the team, and as it turns out, we do have a new color picker: it's an industry standard color picker with 70 colors (used in a bunch of other places on AOL & elsewhere):

Because it's a screen shot, the colors are a little off.

The previous color picker had 48 colors, so we picked up 22 new colors, but we apparently lost that particular shade of hot pink -- I think this is the closest equivalent.

I am honestly not sure what we can do about this -- it's a tradeoff -- more colors, versus a particular shade. You can, of course, specify the color using RGB or hex values using HTML or inline styles, but you have to do it by hand, which is inconvenient.

If you feel strongly about that shade of pink, leave a comment below.

* New Embedded Photo Albums: The team is still trying to find out what our options are for some non-Flash or other implementations of the embedded AOL Pictures albums, for folks who don't want to use the Woohoo galleries for embedded picture albums with multiple photos.

I'm going to have to take some of the blame on this one, since I didn't realize the new Woohoo picture display galleries were going to replace albums that had already been published. If I had connected those dots, I probably would have pushed back on that change. I will keep you updated on possible solutions.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, journals features, r11b