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Hearing Love Divine -- Five Point Plan
An AOL Journals Review
AOLer tdphpscripts has been fiddling around with the AOL Journals tool (that's what you use to make your AOL Journals entries), and has a mixed review. He likes some features, like the ability to IM your entries and the fact it's free (i.e., included in the cost of AOL itself). But he's less impressed with other things, ranging from the technical -- the inability to run one's own scripts -- to the mundane (the mood/music entries not being optional). He also suspects the way AOL presents pictures on AOL Journals is designed specifically to help AOL enforce its Terms of Service.
I don't think it's that. From a practical point of view, uploading a TOS-taunting picture into a You've Got Pictures album accomplishes the same task as typing "IMG SRC" code in HTML to point at said picture. The end user result would be the same in any event: A picture on one's page. The viewer doesn't know where the picture comes from.
From what I know about the design process on the AOL end, it's more about an estimation of the features AOL users would be immediately interested in -- and could use right off the bat. On the picture front, millions of AOL members use YGP to share pictures with family and friends, so from that point of view it makes sense to incorporate what AOLers already know how to use (you can also import pictures from your AOL Hometown pages, which does offer more presentation flexibility).
So, yeah, I think it is about control -- but control for the average user, rather than control of the average user. Of course there's the inevitable tradeoff, in that the AOL user who can code html or php scripts (or at the very least, knows how to install and use them) has the potential to be underserved on the technical side by the AOL Journals initial offering.
And that's a fair call. But we're listening to you (that's in my job discription, at least), so tell us what you like and what you want out of your AOL Journal experience. It's off to a good start, but it's also a work in progress, and that's not a bad thing.
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I need help on adding pictures to my hometown and journal pages to make it more interesting - I have a tendency to be far too extreme on my narratives boring me and my known safe friends and relatives listed on my private preferences as opposed to public weirdos sometime. A person's comments on anything has to be genuine before I add their screennames to my private friends and relatives.
I have an excellent printer with scan features, color, etc but do not own a digital camera . Photocopying regular photographs is about all I can do. Can anyone tell me how to get some interesting old pictures on my journal and hometown pages - I have some photos on some page that other people sent me on a download that I can insert but I want to put my photos, some very old , some very new on my writings. Give me some practical device please!! -
hi, just one comment about the music. I made it optional by simply saying "none" or leaving it blank and nothing happened to my entry. I hope this helps and they don't quit letting me do this. there are just some times when music is not appropriate, like when you are outside or at an appointment.
12/28/07 9:37 PM