Personal Journals were released today for all to try (er, and test!).

What are Personal Journals?
Personal Journals are much like Web Logs or "Blogs". Members may post entries as often as they wish throughout the day. When the entries are displayed, they are ordered by post time and date. Unlike a bulletin board, the author of the Journal may re-edit the entries as often and as many times as she wishes. She may even change the post time and thus change the order in which the entries appear.

Posting in the Quiet of Your Own Home
Entries posted to your journals may contain thoughts and musings that you do not think would fit on any particular board thread and that you don't necessarily need to get any response from. For example, as you are reading a number of books on a subject, you may post notes to a journal you dedicate to that subject as a running log of your thoughts. Since the journals are searchable, they may be a great research tools.

Document Structure
In a sense, Personal Journals are a simple form of Online Book Authoring where the author has great control over the content's organization in the document. For more complicated documents organized by Chapter, Headings, and Subheadings, the "Online Books" feature is almost done.

Who May Use Personal Journals
All members and unregisted guests may read Personal Journals. At the free level, Novices and Citizens may create one Journal and post up to a total of 10 entries. Patrons not only have the ability to create multiple journals, but also to create more entries.

Another Patron feature of Journals is "Statistics." All Patrons' journals display daily lists of readers of their journals as well as daily and total pageview counts.

A funny thing happened on the way to Personal Journals... I developed a new way to get an image into the body of a page.

Previously one had to go to one's image gallery (which is still in the "old system", upload the image there, and then copy the special image tag then go back to a post and paste it in.

Now one can add an image "inline." Although the Personal Journals won't be released until later today (I hope!), members may try out the new image loading now while editing any board post.

Here's how to use the new feature: After posting a message to any board, there is a new link next to the edit link called "Add Image". When that is clicked a dialog first comes up asking to upload an image. Once the image is submitted, it adds the special image tag to the body automatically, making for a fairly seamless work flow.

The old chat system has finally given out. The system that we have been using for chat was developed quickly (in two days) to provide a temporary chat service for the site. That temporary service ended up slugging away for us for over a year!

Today it became obvious that it was time to retire that hard working (too hard working on the server!) system and accelerate the introduction of the new chat system.

I am currently hoping to have a basic version the new chat server up by next week. The retirement of the old chat happens to coincide with the planned development of the "NaviChat" based chat system which was slated to begin this week.

After running into a couple of the always-to-be-expected snags, I think I am almost ready to release the journals for public use.

I have spent time in the last couple few hours refine "in-line" image editing. This will be a great thing to add to other features of the site so it is easier to add and caption images in board posts or personal messages.

The companel went out twice today. This seems to happen when the WhosOnline server (in NY) is not able to contact the site server (in Florida). Since this contact seems to get lost now and then, I am going to try to alter the code so that WhosOnline server does not need to contact its peer so often.


Since work will begin on the foundation for the new NaviChat server this week, the WhosOnline server could get revamped at teh same time.

Another feature made it off the drawing board today. Personal Journals are a way for members to post thoughts, ideas, musings or even reports of what they are up to.

In a sense, Personal Journals are like the News feature at groups and cities. If anyone has ever maintained a "blog," then they should have a good understanding of what Personal Journals are.

To polish the feature off, I still need to modify the background graphics and also provide a way for people to upload their own background graphics to customize the look of their personal journals. I also have to create the delete entry link.