An update to Joe's update of today. The Patch:
Problem identified; it was of course a typo; re-release should go out
soon. Again, what you'll get is exactly what's on
beta.journals.aol.com/(screen name)/(journal name) right now, so there
should be no more surprises. Knock on wood. Character Set:
Problem identified (see below) and we think we have a full fix, which
will need a bit of testing, so that should go out a bit after the
patch. Archive Counts: Still working on it. Ad Banners:
We're listening to suggestions and doing some brainstorming; note that
whatever we come up with has to pass muster with executives.
I'm hopeful, though. Jason Calacanis has a great post about the situation on his blog. I couldn't agree more, and I know that people at AOL are listening.
OK, so now for the geek update. The character set encoding
issue? Well, basically, the major technical update in this
release involved moving to a new web server and servlet engine
(Tomcat). Unfortunately, we discovered too late that Tomcat by
default decides that HTML form data is encoded in ISO-8859-1.
Also unfortunately, Journals uses UTF-8 throughout. For most common
English characters, the two encodings give the same bytes; it's when
you start speaking French (or talking about your re'sume') that you run
into differences. So the problem here is we didn't test this
enough after the switchover and got caught by surprise. The
solution involves setting the encoding to UTF-8, but doing it in the
right place is a bit of a problem -- if you set it AFTER the servlet
engine starts reading stuff, it ignores you. Personally I think
it should throw an exception if this happens since encodings are, well,
kind of important, as we've demonstrated over the past couple of
weeks. In any case, the solution we're looking involves a servlet filter similar to this one.
More generally, we need to figure out how to add this as a general,
automatic test so that it's just not possible to skip it -- and so that
we'll be alerted within hours if some other configuration change breaks
things, hopefully weeks before we make that change to the live
production site.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Has anyone suggested making the ad banners optional?
I'm not sure of the feasibility, but maybe a box to check in the layout when creating a journal if one does not want ads on his journal?
Or something like 'Ad-sense', so we get some kickbacks from having them, though I prefer the first idea, personally.
Just some thoughts.....
Cat
When I was in graduate school, working on my thesis, I spent two days trying to figure out why my computer analysis was all messed up. (Back in the day when the only windows were in buildings, not computers and a mouse was not appreciated anywhere.) Two days of pulled hair and a few tears, only to find that in one spot I had typed the capital letter O instead of the required 0.
It's always the tiny things that make the biggest mess.
I'm glad you're hopeful. It would be nice to know that somewhere people/customers actually count for something besides what's in their wallet.
~~ jennifer
Nice to hear that AOL people are listening to Jason. We very much respected his post. You give me almost a glimmer of hope I will be able to go back to my AOL journal someday . . . .
Virginia
yes.... I don't want a kick-back........ I want my journal back to what it was. Thanks for the update here. judi
It would be nice if the executives were in touch with the actual members of AOL. In your situation, Joe's and John Scalzi's, you folks actually are touching base with us. No matter the disclaimer, it's really not enough. Free AIM Blogs had the ads upon inception; AOL Member Journals didn't. And, that is how things should be.
We are NOT happy AOL Members.
ya know, you have a very nice straightforward attitude about the whole thing. i just want to say thanks. so tired of being stone walled, etc.
I could tolerate the ads if they were much smaller and on the BOTTOM of the page instead of the top. Otherwise I will not blog at AOL Journals, the ads are too UGLY.
Post a Comment