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