Stamping out brush fires, one by one

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.

106 Miles to Chicago

Jason Calacanis is on a mission:  To find or create an AOL executive blog.  Go, Jason, go!

Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.

-- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/quotes

What's happening, and a preview of the new patch

Joe's done a good job of explaining what happened this morning; in technical terms, we pushed out a change, it gave us a surprise, and we hit the metaphorical Undo button.  We're trying to figure out what went wrong now.

The interesting thing (from our perspective) is that the change was pushed out first to beta.journals.aol.com, and it works fine there.  Which means that if you want to see a preview of the change, you can view your blog on beta (use "beta.journals.aol.com" instead of "journals.aol.com" in the URL) and take a look.  My personal opinion?  Might help a little, but we need to do more.  (The release also includes a fix that will, hopefully, resolve the entry saving problem for anyone who still has it.)

In other news, the Washington Post story "You've Got Ads" came out this morning.  Some reactions from the blogosphere are here.  The press release from AOL got some facts wrong about ads on blogging services; I can't comment beyond that since that's an official communication and this blog is highly unofficial.  But, when AOL issues a press release that says the sky is green, I don't think it's against our communications policy to simply note that, looking out the window, the sky looks awfully blue to me.

Those Banner Ads

It's been a long two days stomping out the brush fires ignited by our last install.  And on top of that... the banner ads.   Oh, the ads.

Quote:

I was never happier to be a part of this than I was last Friday, when I got the chance to be guest editor.  In the span of a weekend, I heard from a lot of people that I didn't know before, and discovered a ton of creative journals that I did not know existed.  And then, just two days later, it all disappears, thanks to the inconceivable way that the higher ups of this company thought they could just walk all over us.  Unbelievable.  I have never encountered such a swing, from high to low, in such a short time.  It's incredibly sad for EVERYONE.  And for the life of me, I cannot fathom how NO ONE at AOL has the decency to at least address the situation.  What are they waiting for?  The damage has already been done-there are folks that won't be coming back even if the ads disappear now. -- Jim

Personal opinion, as a blogger?  The ads suck.  The communication about the ads?  Not so good.  And the release problems?  Also not our finest hour.  So, I'm feeling pretty down overall.

Now then... Given that the situation is what it is, what can we do about it?  A dialog would be good.  People are commenting on Joe and John's blogs and grouping and writing petitions and emails, which is great.  I'd suggest one additional thing:  Post your opinion on your blog.  That's what they're for, right?  And when you do, one more technical suggestion that might possibly help with the dialog.  Tag your post by adding this snippet at the end:

Tag: AntiJournalsAds

What this will do:  When you click this link, you'll see a list of all blog entries and other stuff tagged the same way.  More to the point, anyone at AOL can do the same thing and see what people are saying in one place.  Note that you don't have to use Journals to make this work.

(If you choose Viewas [HTML], you should see this: <a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/AntiJournalsAds">AntiJournalsAds</a>.)

I'm assuming here that the posts are actually anti-ads; if you want to post in favor of them, feel free to create a ProJournalsAds tag.  I'm not holding my breath.

Aside from that, we are all working to get your feedback to the right people.  We'll see what happens.  Personally, I'd love to do some revenue sharing between content creators and us; I think this is a case where everybody could win by taking smaller pieces of the pie while growing the pie.  That won't happen quickly, though, for technical reasons.

TagCamp

Just up the road from me, there's a little camp-out planned:  TagCamp.  I'd really love to go myself and roast some hot dogs, but with the Kid it's a bit difficult.  We'll see.  Hopefully we can at least send someone with some hot chocolate and pancakes.

Update: We're sending a posse to TagCamp:

EdwinAoki, SaileshDavuluri, SeanSu - Brainstorming ideas around tag spam, or SPAG.

And, we're helping out with dinner too.  Wish I could be there... I might manage a drop in at some point.  I hope Edwin or Sailesh or Sean will be event blogging.

Tags: TagCamp, SPAG.

AOL buys Weblogs Inc.

(Disclaimer:  I know nothing about this deal aside from what's in the news.)

Good coverage here.   The lines between traditional media and blogging are going to continue to blur.   And AOL is getting in on the ground floor.

Google Blog Search

More competition = healthier ecosystem.  The question really is, will Google entering this arena increase competition or decrease it (by cutting off the air supply of smaller competitors)?  On the third hand, the Google Blog Search is pretty basic so far and the real question is whether they'll continue to innovate and improve it (Google Maps) or let it mostly sit there (Google Groups, though that might be changing).

Some of the more relevant / useful links:
Dave Sifry's reaction: Google's entry validates the space.
Bob Wyman welcomes Google Blog Search because it complements PubSub. Though I think I'm a bit fuzzy on exactly what the distinction is.

Threadwatch has some technical details.
Commentary on Technorati vs. Google from WebProNews (Charlene Li's take).