Part One | Part Two | Part Three
by Scott Schrantz
July 24, 2003
In Part One we looked at how to set up a blog using the new AOL Journals service. On this page, we'll get down to the task of actually using it to write your blog.
As always, my own AOL Journal is online at journals.aol.com/yinandyangtwins/AOLComputerVet, so you can see how these things behave in the wild.
A brand new AOL Journal, with all the editing controls active right in the page.
Once your new journal has been created, and it is up and running, you are dropped into the journal main page, with the editing controls active. Unlike other blogging systems where you have a separate interface for managing posts, with an AOL Journal all the editing controls are built right into the page. I can see how this makes sense, especially from an ease-of-use standpoint. Many first-timers probably would get confused by the notion of your blog existing over here, but the editing controls being over there. So AOL, knowing they were in full control of the templates anyway, and could leave whitespace in all the right places, came up with an innovative solution. The editing controls can be hidden if you want to look at your journal without them. One of the buttons on the screen says, "Hide Edit Controls", and its job is to toggle all the other controls on and off.
One of the first things you should do upon arriving at your new journal is bookmark the URL. Since the AOL client doesn't have any kind of way to list all your blogs at a glance yet, you'll either have to bookmark it or remember the URL. Keep the URL handy because, as I said above, that is also the URL you will use to edit your journal. Authentication for editing is handled through the AOL ScreenName service, which can be reached on the main page at aol.com. If you're logged in as the owner of the journal, you see the editing controls. If you're logged in as anyone else, you see nothing but whitespace. Also, if you visit your journal through the AOL client, you're automatically authenticated.
The sidebars contain a few predetermined subjects.
If you set up your blog with sidebars, the sidebars now need to be filled in. AOL Journals puts the sidebars on your page, and populates them with the boxes you specified during the setup routine, but it leaves the boxes blank. So, if you don't fill them in they look a little funny sitting there on the side of the screen, empty. Out of the five possible sidebar boxes, you can customize three of them. “All About Me”, “Other Journals”, and “Favorite Web Pages”. Each of these boxes has, as part of the editing controls, a button that says, “Edit”. Editing the “All About Me” box brings up a page with a big text box where you can type away. If you are using Internet Explorer, this is a rich text box, where you can choose from a few fonts, colors, and text sizes, as well as making the text bold, italic and adding links. One of the drawbacks to this rich editing environment is that it generates <font> tags instead of using CSS. At the same time, though it generates <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>. So you end up with a weird little bit of tag soup. You also need to watch out how much text you enter, because the sidebars are very narrow, so even a little bit of text can start to take up a lot of vertical space.
Editing either of the other two boxes brings up a page full of little text boxes where you type the title and URL of each link. This lets you create a list of links, which on other services is usually called a blogroll. AOL lets you have two blogrolls, one for other blogs, and one for your favorite (presumably non-blog) sites.
The other two boxes available in the sidebar are “Recent Entries”, which provides a list of the titles of recent posts, and the hit counter, which provides a time warp back to 1997. Each of those boxes can be removed, but not edited. If you remove them and want to put them back in, or if you want to change the order of these sidebar boxes, that can be done in the “Edit Journal” screen, described later.
The editing screen lets you proclaim your mood.
When you're ready start writing, there is a button that says, “Add Entry”. Clicking on it brings up the main editing screen. This screen reminds you which journal you're posting to, but if you have multiple journals it doesn't let you pick which one you're posting to, like some blogging systems do. It has an input box for the title, and also a box for the “Music I'm Listening To”. Yes, this is a standard field for every entry. And yes, it's part of each of the three post templates. You can leave the box blank, but it will still show up as a blank space in the post. So, in short, AOL deemed the “Now Playing” feature, which a small number of people add to their blogs, was important enough to become a major part of the interface. Puzzling. The same goes for the “Mood” drop-down. They want you to post your mood, but they only give you a limited number of options to choose from. If your mood isn't there, don't bother posting!
In the interest of full reporting, here is the complete list of moods you're allowed to feel: Happy, Mischievous, Worried, Silly, Surprised, Flirtatious, Angry, Ecstatic, Frustrated, Loopy, Embarrased, Hopeful, Anxious, Sad, Quiet, and Chillin'. This is the full list of AOL Time Warner approved emotions. Any deviance from this list, and your access to AOL Journals will be revoked. Yes they spelled “Embarrassed” wrong.
There is option to add pictures here, but instead of a simple upload, it runs through the AOL You've Got Pictures service. The whole process of posting, and viewing, pictures is horribly complex, but you can upload a whole album of pictures in one go. The pictures feature is unwieldy enough to warrant its own coverage. I'll be talking about it in Part Three.
After you've entered the meta-information about the entry, you are given a text box to type the entry itself. If you're using Internet Explorer, this is a Rich Text editing window, just like the All About Me box was. It has the same text editing controls, and generates the same tag soup. The editing box is only big enough to show a few lines of text at once, so if you're working on a long entry there will be some scrolling involved. There is also a reminder here that you can post to your Journal from an instant message. I'll also be covering that in Part Three. When your entry is ready, click on “Save”. You don't get any opportunity to preview the post, or save it as a draft. It is immediately posted to your journal, and you are redirected to the main page.
Posts are given the template you chose during the setup routine.
Back at the main page, you'll see that the entry has been posted. A date header has been created, and the template you chose during setup has been applied. Each entry has a permalink, which links to a separate page just for that entry, much like Movable Type. There is also a link to the author's information. Unfortunately, the author's information is linked to a proprietary AOL-only protocol, aol://. In the AOL client, a Buddy List window pops up showing the author's profile. In any other browser, the link not only opens up AOL, but actually signs you on automatically just so you can see the buddy info. Unbelievable. If you don't have AOL installed, I can only imagine you're out of luck. You'd think that with all the trouble they went to make the page cross-browser, they could have found a different way to handle author info. As it is, everything is tied to your AOL Screen Name.
After the entry comes the comments link. The comments on AOL Journals are a mixed bag. They have their very excellent parts, and their very crappy parts. They're so complex that they've also earned themselves a spot on Page Three.
After you've posted an entry, two buttons will appear to the right of it. “Edit Entry” and “Delete Entry”. “Delete Entry” does just what it says, without any confirmation dialogs or anything. Click it, and the post is gone. “Edit Entry” takes you back to the same editing screen you get for a new entry, with everything prefilled. Here you can make any changes, just like you'd expect to be able to.
You can change any of the options you set during setup.
Let's say you've been using your journal for a while, but there's some setting you made during the setup that's been nagging you. Luckily, you have the ability to change almost everything you did. There is also a button, right next to “Add Entry”, that says “Edit Journal”. This takes you to a control panel where you can modify the settings you specified during the setup routine. Every option that you were given, every screen you saw in the wizard when you created your journal, can be revisited and changed. This is one nice feature that I'm glad to see. If you made a mistake anywhere along the way, you can go back and change it. You can even change the name and description you set up in the first step. You can change the layout and reorganize the sidebars. You can change the post template, and turn comments on and off. You can change to a different color scheme. The only thing you can't change is the URL of the journal. Once you set that, it is set in stone.
One ease-of-use advantage that they gave AOL Journals is that there is no "rebuild" button like Movable Type has. With AOL, any time you make a change to the settings, your journal is automatically rebuilt. I'm sure that will go a long way towards helping people understand the service a little bit more. People using AOL wouldn't necessarily understand the notion of that intermediate state when you've made changes but haven't applied them yet. When they make a change, they'll want to see it go into effect right away, and AOL was smart to build the system so it does that without asking.
Also on the “Edit Journal” screen there are a couple of extra options, Manage Permissions and Delete this Journal. Deleting the journal is pretty straightforward. And, unlike deleting a post, you are actually given a confirmation screen for that. Managing permissions actually takes you to a screen where you can block certain users from adding comments to your blog. Since the comment system is driven by Screen Names, as you'll find out on the next page, you can easily set up a block list of people forbidden to write. I can see where this might come in handy. AIM has the same feature, and apparently flaming is a big problem on AOL.
That's mostly all you need to know to run an AOL Journal. Posting, editing, customizing your sidebar, and changing your options. AOL didn't stop there, though. They went a few steps further and added in some spiffy new features, some of them aping what you'll find in other blogs, and some of them using the unique advantages of the AOL system. Part Three will focus on these special features.
Part One of this series covered the process of creating a new AOL Journal. Go there!
Part Three of the series covers the extra special features, such as Post-From-AIM, Comments, and Archives. Go there!
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
