Friday Blogplugs

Okay, so after a break, here's another round of Friday Blogplugs, which are blog entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the blogplugs to get them in front of other people. Remember, if I ever slack on blogplugs, or you want to see everything that people have tagged (I usually just feature one per person per week), just click the link:

* Sugar remembers Princess Di on the 10th anniversary of her death.

* Indigo talks about rescuing strays.

* Donna shares her photos from this week's lunar eclipse.

* Christopher posted a video blog entry (I have to confess, I haven't watched it all the way through yet)

* Barbara shares her custom online radio station.

* Guido takes a look back at the year in Journaling.

* Paul posted some photos of a recent hand injury. (They're not loading for me right now -- I'm getting a Hometown "This member has exceeded their bandwith [sic] for the day" message.

Not sure what's up with Hometown these days -- for JPGs, you might want to look at AOL Pictures or another photo hosting service. And frankly, I'm not overly eager to see those particular utility knife wound photos.)

* Lastly, Ellie has a little message about positivity.

Have a great Labor Day holiday weekend, everyone.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs

Update on Journals R13 Release

Hi folks -- quick update on the Journals R13 Beta release I mentioned last week -- it's currently scheduled to be installed midnight EDT, Wednesday, 9/5 (that's 9pm PDT, Tuesday 9/4).

R13 gets us comments restyling and embedded polls for US users (see the earlier entry for more details.) We were trying to get it in before Labor Day, but the team didn't want to risk introducing any instability before the long holiday weekend.

Right, I'm not aware of any open problems -- a couple of folks have mentioned some Alerts non-deliveries (including mobile Alerts), but it doesn't seem widespread. Let me know if anyone is seeing trouble and I'll pass along to the Alerts team.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, journals status, r13

AOL Journals R13 Release in Beta

Hi folks -- got some bad news and good news.
First, the bad news: No Friday blogplugs today.
Click the "blogplugs" link
to see the entries that people have tagged.

Now, the
good news; the next AOL Journals release, R13, is
now in beta. If all goes well, we should be able to launch it sometime
next week.

You can play around with the beta right
now, with the following cautions:

* Whatever you do
in your Beta Journal will not show up in your live,
production Journal. So only use it for testing and
messing around.

* The Beta servers seem to be
experiencing some occasional slowness. (The live production servers are
running okay.)

If you want to play around with the
beta, just stick "beta." on the front of your Journal's address. For
example, for me, the beta version of Magic Smoke
is:

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

What Do We Got in R13?
R13
is still a relatively small release, so we haven't been referring to it
with a code name (which, as you might recall, you decided would use a
"Muppets" theme). The first Muppet-code named release will probably be
in the fall.

Here are the primary changes you'll see
in R13:

* Comments Restyling: A
few enhancements to increase readability:

-
Numbering: Broke out the comment numbers so they're easier to
see
- Alternating comment color backgrounds.
- When blog owners
comment in your own blog, it puts "Blog Author" by your
name.
- Also for blog owners: The "Delete Comment" and "Block
This Screen Name" buttons are tucked away behind the "Actions [+]"
link. This is also to improve comment readability for owners, so you
don't have all those buttons sitting around.

*
Polls: We've had polls in Beta before, but now they're
a whole lot easier to use -- before, you had to know the IFRAME HTML
code to embed the poll into your Journal entry. Now,
just:

1. Click the "Add Poll" button in the button
bar or the formatting toolbar:

2.
Fill in the fields to create your poll and hit "Create" to drop it in
to your entry:

Once
the poll is in your entry, you can edit around it, just like an
embedded item in any other entry. You can see a live
poll example in my Beta
journal.

Additional note -- polls hasn't
been localized for international users, so it's only available to US users
now.

* This next one isn't really a feature, it's a
change. When you create a new Journal, the Hit Counter won't be on the
default template any more -- if you want it, you'll have to add it by
clicking Edit Journal > Change the layout or
features

Existing Journals will be unaffected by this.

Since the Journals hit counters are
basically unsupported (and have been for some time), we're taking them
off the default template until we can come up with a better
solution.

There are also some bug fixes, and some
behind-the-scenes stuff, but that's pretty much all the user-facing
changes you'll see in this release.

Play around with
the beta as you like, and let us know how you feel about these changes.
We'll let you know when we install R13 next
week.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, journals beta, r13, embedded polls, commenting

Slushpile Links: Moms, Mindsets and More

Hi folks -- here are a few bloggy items that may be of interest from my blog topic slushpile:

* Don't Mess With Mom: What happens when a mother of six kids discovers that the sneaky brats slipped a bunch of Pokemon cards into her shopping cart when she wasn't looking? She puts them on eBay (the cards, not the kids), laying out the full story in the description, which is funny and well-written and gets picked up and passed around (as these things often do).

The auction is over -- she got $142.51 out of it, which I think is a considerable premium over their fair market value. That's the power of good writing. Also marketing, I guess. Oh, and she probably earned some of her writing chops on her mom-blog: Because I Said So. [link via Fark]

* It's Mindset Time: Yet again, it's time for the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2011, another depressing/uplifting reminder of how much the world has changed, because it shows what incoming college freshmen take for granted as having "always been that way." A few highlights:

 4. They never "rolled down" a car window.
15. Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
27. Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
36. American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.
45. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.
61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

Also of note is #44, "Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time," which is a nice way to characterize social profiles and blogging. [I saw the link on USA Today yesterday, but they don't get a link since they didn't bother to link to the actual Beloit College page.]

* Busted for Blogging (Cartoon Style): Lemont, lead character of the Candorville comic, who is planning on getting married (against his better judgment) finds out that his father-in-law-to-be reads his blog.

* Domain Names for Babies: This has been touched on a few times, but the AP has another story about how parents are scooping up domain names for their precious offspring. (Previous articles have said that some parents are even choosing names based on domain name availability.)

I think this is a stupid idea -- even assuming the current domain name system is going to be the same in ten years or whatever, I think it's safe to assume that any self-respecting child is going to want to come up with their own domain name.

So yeah, they're vanity domains -- for the parents' vanity.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: slushpile, vanity domains, mindset list

Happy 4-Year AOL Journals Anniversary

Hi folks -- sorry, I got caught up in a few things today or else I would have blogged about it sooner -- it being August 21st, that means today marks the AOL Journals Four-Year Anniversary! Feel free to celebrate by using this anniversary graphic in your blog (it was originally created by us, and updated this year by Donna:

AOL Journals 4-Year Anniversary Animated Gif -- updated by Donna.

Blogger John posted his entry about it this morning; if you've done your own entry about the anniversary or your tenure with AOL Journals, leave a comment with a link to your entry (you can also give it the tag "aol journals anniversary" so that other people can find it by clicking on the link).

On a related note, on Sunday, I stopped by the Journals Cafe anniversary chat that Guido had set up. Check out his chat log if you dare.

We've kind of hit a lull in Journals activity; the team is working on a few things for the fall that will hopefully help revitalize the product and the community of Journalers, but I don't quite feel comfortable talking about it yet -- not until we can start seeing some of the actual development work.

 (The team has also had some smaller releases recently, but it's all been back-end and server migration stuff -- nothing worthy of a muppet code name yet.)

Anyway, I'm still here, so I hope you'll stick around too.

Thanks, and happy anniversary! -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, aol journals anniversary

Friday Blogplugs, Plus an Upcoming Anniversary

Here's another round of Friday Blogplugs, which are blog entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the blogplugs because they want other people to see them. Remember, when you tag an entry of yours, you're labeling it for blog search engines, and by clicking the link, you can see everything else that shares that tag:

* Guido asks for all J-Land Journalers to join in an AOL Journals 4-Year Anniversary Chat, this Sunday, August 19th, 4PM EDT (9PM GMT, 1PM PDT), in the Journals Cafe [AOL in-client link only -- promise by the 5-Year Anniversary, we'll have a robust Web chat solution in place].

Before you ask: No, I didn't forget. The actual anniversary date is August 21 -- I'd already asked Jason over here to do an update to the Journals anniversary graphic, though it looks like you guys already beat us to it.

* Indigo gives a personal account of domestic violence.

* TixGirl Ames has a concert report of last week's the Daft Punk show in Coney Island.

* Dawn talks about friendships, chronic illnesses and more.

* Zoe shares information about the Lockerbie bombing and asks you to sign a petition.

* Sugar shares her memories of Elvis.

* Donna has some weekend memories, plus a bonfire video.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs, aol journals

Slushpile Links: Mix & Share, MyYearbook, and Mythic Picks

Hi folks -- I've been throwing links into my blog topic slushpile left and right, since I keep finding things I'd like to write about, but just haven't been able to get to them:

* Mix & Share a Feed of Your Friends' Blogs: I keep saying I'll do a tutorial about how to do this (next week, honest), but for right now, check out this page I mashed together, featuring a whole bunch of different AOL Product blogs.

What I did was use a MyAOL feature to build a custom page featuring the most recent entries from about 16 different blogs. You can do it with your friends' blogs, or any other blog interest you could come up with (and not just blogs -- anything with a feed).

It's similar in concept to LiveJournal Friends pages, or what you can do with Yahoo Pipes, and it's a very neat and easy use of feeds.

I'll do a full tutorial next week, but here's the rundown for you self-starters: 1. Go to MyAOL and click the Feeds Tab. 2. Add a new folder, and add the feeds for your friends' blogs to it. 3. Click the "Mix & Share" button to get the Web address of the page that shows all your friends' feeds.

* What were you doing at 17? If you're like me, you weren't the co-founder of a social networking Web site aimed at teens with 30 employees and millions of dollars in annual revenue. This is because you're not Catherine Cook of MyYearbook.com. And neither am I. (Though a comment in the CNET article suggests that the 17-year-old thing may be more of a marketing angle. The truth? I have no idea, though the skeptics should probably come up with more than an anonymous source.)

* Plausible: A list of Mythbusters' Adam Savage's Top 10 Daily Web sites. Geeky, techy link sites are well-represented(but did you have to make it in Flash?) [link via Fark.com, which is #1 on the list.]

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: slushpile, mythbusters, myyearbook, catherine cook, myaol, mix and share, feeds

Resolved: Blank New Entry Alerts

Hi folks -- I just got the word from John on the Alerts team, who says that there were some production issues with the connection to the database last night. Alerts deliveries during that time period were blank.

He says the problem was resolved last night and Alerts deliveries today have been normal.

Please let me know if you're continuing to have any Alerts problems.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, aol alerts, aol journals status

8/15: Blank New Entry Alerts

Hi folks -- just wanted to give you a heads-up that a bunch of people have reported getting blank New Entry Alerts. I've asked the Journals and Alerts teams to look into it.

That also reminds me that I've been meaning to talk about some of the new My AOL feed reading features, including Mix & Share, which you may find useful -- it lets you mash together the feeds from your friends blogs and put them all on a Web page (that also acts as a feed) -- I'll be sharing one of my own so you can see what I'm talking about.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, aol alerts, journals status, my aol, mix and share

Friday Blogplugs

Hi folks --if it's Friday (and it is), it must mean that it's time for another round of blogplugs, which are blog entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the blogplugs tag so that other people will find them (click on the link to see everything people have tagged this way):

* Christopher did an entry blogplugging two friends: Franklin and new blogger Christopher.

* Dana posts some random funny questions.

* Sugar shares a doggie treat recipe.

* Jimmy's week in review includes ear hair.

* Indigo discusses the relationship between deafness and balance.

* Lisa has a cautionary tale about magazine sales scams.

* Val invites you to make some Lolpets.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs

Leave Comments and Join Private Journals Using Your E-Mail Address as a Screen Name

Hi folks -- here's how people who don't have an AOL or AIM screen name can comment in your AOL Journal, be added to the rosters of your private Journals, and even create Journals of their own: They just have to register their e-mail address and use it as a kind of screen name.

Even though you can get a free AIM screen name at AIM.com without having to download anything, some people don't and won't do it. By registering their e-mail address to use as a screen name, it's a lighter, quicker process.

How to Register Your E-Mail Address as a Screen Name
Say you don't have an AOL or AIM screen name, your e-mail address is foo@example.com, and you want to leave a comment in an AOL Journal or view a private Journal. When you try, you'll hit a registration screen. Click the link to Get a Screen Name (trust me on this):

Two variations of "Get a Screen Name"

On the next screen, choose the option that says "Use an existing e-mail address as a Screen Name" and click Continue:

Fill out the form. You'll just need to confirm your e-mail address, choose a password and security question and a few other details, then agree to the terms of service and prove you're not a bot:

After you successfully register, you'll get an e-mail to the e-mail address you registered with. Click on the link in the e-mail, and you'll activate your account. Then, the next time you get asked for a screen name and password, sign in with your e-mail address (foo@example.com) and the password you chose:

Signing in using your registered e-mail address as a screen name.

After you've signed in, you'll be able to leave comments (and do a bunch of other things, below).

Using Your Registered E-Mail Address With Private Journals
If you're a Private Journal owner, here's what you do for people without Screen Names who you want to read your blog:

1. Tell your friends to claim their e-mail address as their screen name (as outlined above)
2. Add that e-mail address (the full address, with the "@" sign and all, like foo@example.com) to your private Journal's roster.
3. When your friends sign in using their e-mail address and password, they'll be able to read your Private Journal.

(This eliminates some of the back-and-forth of adding a new AIM screen name to your roster.)

A Few Notes:
Now, when people register their e-mail addresses as a screen name, it's still a registration process -- it's just a little faster than getting a regular screen name, and it still requires you confirm the e-mail address (so you prove who you are).

It's similar to the registration processes you see in some other blog platforms, like Wordpress or Blogger, when the blogger doesn't allow anonymous comments.

A few other things:

* Once you register your e-mail address for use as a Screen Name, you can also use it to create a Journal of your own, get Alerts, use AOL Pictures and more. (You can't sign into the AOL software with it, though you can use it with AIM.) However, not all AOL products support these kinds of screen names, though we're working on it.

* Since you're using your screen name as an e-mail address, there will be places where the e-mail address will be visible. For example, if you register "foo@example.com" as a screen name, and use it to create a Journal, the URL for your Journal will be: journals.aol.com/foo@example.com/nameoftheblog

* For comments in AOL Journals, you'll see the part of the e-mail address before the @ sign, followed by the ellipsis (foo@...). However, hovering over the name will show the full e-mail address. This puts you on the same footing as AOL screen names, since AOL screen names are also e-mail addresses.

* These types of screen names, where you register your e-mail address as a screen name, are known internally as ONS, or Open Name Space IDs. However, we don't refer to it externally as ONS. This is a big hassle to write about, since I have to keep saying "screen names where you use your e-mail address as a screen name."

Hope this helps.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: screen names, ons, aol journals

Friday Blogplugs

Hi folks --  man, the days are just flying by, aren't they? That just means I haven't been able to do half the things I've been meaning to do this week. Anyway, here's another round of blogplugs, which are blog entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the blogplugs tag so that other people will see them:

* TixGirl Ames shares her concert photos from the Rock the Bells Festival in NY.

* Stephen covers a whole bunch of things that no one asked him about, in a free-versey kind of way.

* Sugar has an animal story for the weekend.

* Dawn has a... different kind of animal story.

* Donna shares some photos and six embedded videos from her trip to Niagara Falls.

* Indigo shares some self-reflections about her blog journey.

* Val wants to start a Monday lolcats feature

If you've got an entry you want to blogplug, send it to me or tag it with the blogplugs tag so that other folks can find it.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs

When Cats With Bows and Arrows Play Golf

Here's a Flash game that involves a cat with a bow and arrow playing golf. I know it sounds strange, but it works:

There's a fullscreen version on a Flash games site [link via Fark], though the original is in this blog entry (which is in Japanese).

Tips:

* Remember, it's cartoon physics
* Use the walls and ceiling
* You can shoot in mid-air. In fact, you have to in the later holes
* Don't fall through the floor

No bow and arrow-toting cats were harmed in the making of this game. I hope.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: flash, games, cat with bows and arrows, cartoon physics