I don’t normally talk about work, but I’m making an exception because this one was a lot of fun. It’s officially in beta now, and I can talk about it. Yay!! The new My AOL launched its first beta today, and I worked on it! I got to play with everyone’s favorite new javascript toy: XMLHTTPRequest, and did most of the CSS and a good deal of the markup. It was a fun project to spend a couple weeks on, and there’s a lot of potential for cool stuff with it.\
It is still very beta (in the traditional sense of the word). It’s a little slow in Safari for some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, and there’s a really funny jumping icon thing in Firefox that, again, we haven’t been able to figure out (it jumps the exact width of a scrollbar, but no scrollbar shows up, so it’s double-weird).\
Play around with it, try adding your own feed, and see how it goes. There are a couple odd things about how it chooses which feeds to grab, and which RSS fields to display (for example, if you have both summary and content:encoded, it will only use summary), and if you have multiple feeds in your HTML, it will choose the first if they all have the same link. Hey, it’s a beta.\
There’s lots of cool stuff coming in subsequent releases, so stay tuned!
The New My AOL: Feeds Are Cool
So when will we be able to create custom folders, dumping everything in “Miscellaneous” just doesn’t do it for me. I really want to like it, honest I do.
Custom categories introduce more technical complications than you might think at first, and in order to allow them we’re going to have to re-think some of the current UI. I don’t see them slated for beta 2, but I’m pretty sure they are on the radar. They may make the first GM release, but the schedule for that is not yet defined.
I hope I’m allowed to say all that. If not, my name is Shackleford. Rusty Shackleford.
-Bill