Happy Halloween to all!

Hi Folks,

Happy Halloween to all of you from the Journals team!
Hope you had a spooky, scary fun-filled one!

We have a new release planned for next week..details will follow later.
Stay tuned!

Also for this friday... don't forgot to tag your best entry with blogplugs so it can be featured.
I am sorry we could not get to the blogplugs last friday, I will make sure they happen this friday  :-)
                                             
Have a good evening,

Malika



                                                    

Tags: Halloween, blogplugs, new release

Friday Blogplugs

Hey folks,

This week's roundup of Blogplugs is brought to you by Joseph Manna. I know I'm not as awesome as Joe, but I sat next to him as he tirelessly checked other Journalers' blogs to highlight the best of the best within the AOL Journals community.

Before I get into this week's blogplugs, I'm confident that I speak for all of us in saying that we greatly appreciated all the work that Joe Loong dedicated to helping people. He did an excellent job at keeping us informed about Journals, Hometown and AOL FTP. You can find him blogging on his personal blog, Dumb Things I Have Done Lately.

There was only a small handful of blogplugs this week:

* Sugar who has some tasty recipes and tips for packing school lunches, shared her thoughts about Joe's absence. She also let us know that Oct. 15 was Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day.

* Jimmy rings in Hump Day with some history, a collection of photos from his pal Nancy and a joke.

* Paul shares ten of his favorite movies from his Top 100 list of movies.

* Dawn submitted her lolcat image to Icanhascheezburger and it was accepted and she wants folks to vote on it. [Insider's note: What is a lolcat?]

 

Mini-Tutorial: Tagging on AOL Journals

Below the editor where you wrote your blog entry, there's a text field where you can type words that describe your entry. It's called tagging, and helps blog search engines like Technorati find your blog. Tag it with blogplugs (and other descriptive phrases). Here's what it looks like for this entry as I wrote it:

I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable weekend.

~ Joseph

Tags: blogplugs, aol journals, featured, tagging

Yay, Missing Entries are Back!

Hi folks,

The AOL Journals team has some good news. The team recovered all the missing entries and comments on your blogs. (In case you didn't know, some time ago, there was a problem with the databases which resulted in missing entries.)

In
case you added an entry in the last couple of days, you could possibly
see the entry twice. If you see your entries twice, you can delete the
additional one, but you will lose the comments that it had.
(Personally, I'd keep both, but it's up to you.)

During
the outage, there were a few new Journals that were created. The team
reports they are now in the process of restoring the newly-created
Journals and expect they should all be added by tomorrow.

Also, tomorrow Joseph Manna will be featuring Blogplugs for the Journals community, so don't forgot to tag your best entry with blogplugs so it can be featured.

The
AOL Journals team appreciates your patience and support. We will work
on getting some tutorials and other suggestions out for you. If you
want learn how to do something with AOL Journals, drop the team a line
by writing to JournalsEditor@aol.com and I'll pass the word to the team.

Thanks --- Malika and Joseph

Update: 10/19/2007 8:05 PM -- The Journals team confirms that all the new  Journals created during the 10/16 outage have been restored successfully.

Tags: aol, journals, status, info, databases, aoljournals, new journals restored

Wednesday without our Editor.....

Hi folks,


I am Malika from the left coast, an engineer on the journals team.


We are all disappointed and sad as you are.

"Magicsmoke" is not the same without Joe.


I don't think anyone of us can fit into Joe's shoes, however I would
like to assure you that the journals team promises to be there for you.


While  management is working things out, a few of us decided to keep Joe's spirit going.

We will keep you informed on any upcoming releases, new features, downtime etc.

I hope you continue to write to us like you did to Joe, and we will continue to respond to your concerns, queries and issues.


Here is an update on the missing entries:

Journals database folks are currently working on it and because of the
huge amount of work involved, they are hoping to restore all those
missing entries by tomorrow. I will keep you posted on their progress.


Thanks --- Malika

Tags: aol journals

Twofer Tuesday: Missing Entries And Missing Editor

Hi folks -- sorry for the delay in posting this. As many of you have reported, entries that were posted yesterday (Monday, 10/15), have vanished. I asked the Journals database folks about it, and here's what happened:

* There were problems with the database host last night.
* The database was "failed over" to the replicate database
* However, apparently the replicate database has had trouble replicating for a few days, so some posts didn't make it back to production
* They "failed over" back to the original database host, and the DB ops are trying to find a way to restore the missing entries.

I will ask that the team keep everybody updated on status.

However (and this is part two of the twofer Tuesday), I won't be able to give you those updates,  since I'm no longer going to be Journals Editor. As you may have heard, AOL laid off a bunch of people today, and I'm one of them. So after about two-and-a-half years and just under 1,000 entries in this blog, I will be leaving you.

Not to fret, though -- I'll be fine, and I've asked that someone (or some group of folks, most likely) pick up the mantle of Journals Editor and continue supporting and publicly communicating about the AOL Journals product. Until they sort that out, though, posting to Magic Smoke and responses to JournalsEditor@aol.com may fall off.

It's been great working with you over the years -- sorry I couldn't get a lot of what you folks were asking for. 

Best of luck to everyone.

Thanks -- Joe

Friday Blogplugs

Hi folks -- you know, the days feel about the same, but the weeks just fly on by. Here's another round of blogplugs, which are entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the tag blogplugs so that other people can find them:

* Guido talks about the best ways to handle trolls

* Paul gives us 10 more movies from his list of 100 that he really likes.

* Indigo talks about some of the method to her madness.

* Barbara would like you to see this entry by Ginger.

* Val told us that last Sunday was Respect Life Sunday.

* Sugar celebrated a blog birthday this week.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs

Complete Superfluous Weather Report: 93 in October

Not for nothing, but according to the current weather reading, it's currently 93 degrees F. In Virginia. In October:

Yikes.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: screenshot, photos, weather

Friday Blogplugs

Hi folks -- time for anothere's another round of blogplugs, which are entries that people have sent to me or labeled with the tag blogplugs so that other people can find them:

* Beth posts news about an English band, The Godfathers (who I must admit I'm not familiar with).

* TixGirl Ames shares her pics and video from the So You Think You Can Dance live tour (I must also admit I did not know there was such a thing).

Indigo uses a childhood story to induce laughter (the best medicine).

* Christopher wants you to see his live webcam stream (though I still don't know why he doesn't have access to Web storage space).

* Lisa has an entry that she hopes will explain more about her life.

* Sugar shares a tag graphic, prayers and poetry in memory of Penny.

* Connie would like to invite you to a virtual Halloween party in her blog.

In other news, we should have some incremental Journals improvements in a install next week or so, which we'll talk about Monday (since we don't get Columbus Day off -- or Canadian Thanksgiving, for that matter).

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: blogplugs

Back Up Your AOL Journal With the Atom Publishing Protocol (Kinda-Sorta)

OK folks, this isn't going to be particularly useful unless you're a programmer. I hinted at this yesterday in my entry on the AOL Open Blogs API. (Which, as you recall, is like a set of programming hooks that let developers work with Journals data so they can combine it with data from other sources and create mashups. You can learn more about the Open Blogs API on the dev.aol.com site.)

Underneath all that is an implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol, which has been out for a while, but we've never really talked about since it's not really of use to non-programmers, except for one thing -- you can (kinda-sorta) use it to back up your Journal.

I keep saying kinda-sorta because, unless some programmer writes an import/export utility, it's not really going to be super-useful to folks. However, I'll show you the potential value here, using this blog as an example:

1. My blog's URL is http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

2. To view my blog's Atom feed, I stick "atom.xml" at the end:

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

3. Now, as developer Miodrag says, "Atom is not for casual browsing - it's xml intended for programmatic processing ... this is only for programmers who want to build custom apps or mashups."

This means that, in the Internet Explorer Web browser, you'll see an ugly mess that's only meant to be read by machines, but it's an ugly mess that contains all the content of your Journal entries (but not your comments, All About me, or sidebar links):

This is the content of your blog entries, as seen by machine.

The .xml file is much more pleasant to look at in Firefox:

You can save this .xml file to your computer.

4. By default, you'll only see your 10 most recent blog entries. However, to see your older entries: specify a page number by adding ?page=2 at the end of your URL (don't forget the question mark):
http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/atom.xml?page=2

Page 2, or the next 10 entries.

5. If you keep increasing the number (?page=3), you'll see the next 10 entries, and so on.

If you enter a number that's too high, you'll get an error message. (Right now, according to my Journals Public List page (http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/), I have 958 entries; at 10 entries per page, that means I can go all the way up to ?page=96 (958 divided by 10 is 95 and change).

So What Do You Do With This?
Well, that's where the kinda-sorta comes in. Not only is going 10 entries at a time labor intensive and completely by hand, right now, we don't have a tool to import or export these XML files. (I'm hoping some developer will create one, but I have no idea if anyone will.) So you can't really do anything with it at this point,

So, like I said earlier, this isn't going to be useful to folks right now. But it's a sample of what people will be able to do, once programmers start playing around with the APIs and create mashups.

If you're a programmer who's interested in creating a mashup, check the AOL Open Blogs API site for more info and complete documentation.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol open blogs api, aol journals, atom publishing protocol

AOL Open Blogs API Released

The AOL Journals team and the AOL Developer Network are pleased to announce the release of the AOL Open Blogs API.

Unless you're a software developer (and I am not), this is probably not going to mean much to you at this particular moment. An API is an "Application Programming Interface," which is like a gateway in one application (in this case, Journals) that lets other applications do... stuff.

This typically results in a mashup application, which is basically when you take the functionality of two or more applications and use the API "hooks" to mash them together to do interesting things. (Popular types of mashups you may have used include map mashups, where people use the APIs of a mapping application, like Google Maps or Mapquest, to display restaurant reviews, real estate prices or crime reports on a map.)

Here's an example in the AOL Developer Network's Mashup Gallery, which features a bunch of different sample mashups using AOL's different APIs (note: this one is pretty raw and is primarily proof-of-concept; there's not much to look at, since there's no design or UI) -- the Buddy List Blogs application, which mashes up the AIM and Blog APIs to show you the blog feeds of all the AOL Journals belonging to folks in your Buddy List.

Journals Tech Manager Junaid also has a little bit more about the Open Blog API, and there's a brief writeup at the ProgrammableWeb Blog (which also has a primer on APIs and mashups in their FAQ.

If you'd like more information about the AOL Blogs API, you can find the full documentation on the AOL Open Blogs API page.

Like I said, for non-coders, this is going to be of limited utility until programmers start working their magic and mashing things up.

However, one thing that may be of interest involves using the Atom Publishing Protocol to kinda-sorta back up your blog, which I know a lot of you folks are interested in (it's kinda-sorta because it'll be a bit unwieldy unless someone writes a utility to streamline it). I will blog it tomorrow after I confirm a few things.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol journals, api, open blogs api, mashups

A Journaler Passes

Hi folks -- Malika from the Journals team in California gave me a heads-up: Journaler Penny of Penny's Pieces of Ohio passed away on Monday.

Penny's friend Cathie was good enough to post a notice to the blog, and the number of comments that other Journalers left brought it to Malika's attention.

Condolences to all of Penny's friends and family.

Thanks -- Joe