Found: Missing Blogger

When we all moved over here to Blogger when AOL kicked us out, some people got lost, or went missing, or didn't make the move, or sometimes they just had a lot going on in their lives and haven't been around for a while. It's sad, but we lost quite a few of our friends due to differing circumstances.

Today I have good news. One of our little lost Sheep has returned to the Blogging fold. I know I don't have a huge bunch of people who read here, but if you remember Stacy, drop on over to her place and welcome her back!

Public Service Announcement

We interrupt this blog for the following Public Service Announcement....

I know that some of the people who are moving their journals over here from AOL may not be the most tech savvy group of people.... and some, like me, may just be having a hardware problem. I have a tip coming up.

One of my problems with AOL pulling the plug on Journals and Hometown at just this minute was this; having returned from my trip/adventure the first thing I did was put my laptop into the shop to have the DVD drive fixed. The drive had been acting up for a while, but I had nursed it thru going on this trip because it was going to be the only entertainment I had. Read that as I took a bunch of DVDs with me to watch cause I had NO television, no radio, no internet. Sigh!

Normally being without my laptop for a short period isn't too bad. I can use G's laptop to check e-mail and blogs, and I just put off everything else till I have my baby back. G has the bare essentials on this machine. It is old. It only has 128mb of Ram and a 20 gig harddrive and USB 1.0. He only uses it for surfing the web and e-mail. I do NOT have all of my usual resources. I needed a solution of where to download my FTP stuff. Even plugging my external harddrive into this machine is an interesting proposition. I needed some other way to take care of Hometown....

My solution?? Photobucket! They offer a free and a paid account. The free account is fine for what I'm going to explain. I had decided to get a photobucket account anyway to upload my animated content to due to the problem that Flickr doesn't support animations. After signing up for the account I was thrilled to discover that you can move pictures using the picture/graphics urls twenty at a time.

So, here's what you do if you want to move your FTP Hometown things without downloading and re-uploading them and using only a web browser:

1. Open up Hometown in one tab and Photobucket in another. I reccommend using Firefox. Sign into both AOL and Photobucket. Do not use the AOL client software... you need to be on the internet and in a browser for this to work. If you don't have Firefox, IE 7 or above should work.
2. About halfway down the Hometown page you should see AOL Hometown: File Manager. Click on that and you will be taken to the file manager. From here you should see your files that you have stored on AOL FTP.
   
3. Right click on the file that you wish to move from Hometown to Photobucket and choose Copy Link Location from the drop down box
   
4. Now move to the photobucket tab and choose the Web URL option. It will give you 3 spots to paste your url link into, but if you look farther down you will see where it says add more. Click on add more and it increases to 20 spaces.
5. Click on the space and using ctrl-v (or right click and use paste), this will put a copy of the link to your picture/graphic from Hometown into the space
6. Repeat steps 2 - 4 till you have the pictures/graphics you want or you have filled all 20 spaces
7. Click the Upload button in Photobucket (Located under the url spaces)
8. Photobucket will now upload a copy of the photos/graphics.
9. Repeat till you have moved all of the files you want to Photobucket.
   

Not an elegent solution, I admit. But a workable one if you don't understand how to use FTP programs, or don't have access to anything but a web browser!! I only had around 250 files (less than 10mb) in Hometown, so this was a viable solution for me.

Any questions... feel free to ask and I'll try to help.

Goodbye AOL

Goodbye AOL and thanks for the encouragement to move on and use better tools!

Just a quick note to anyone who hasn't moved their AOL Journal. I just did it and it went seamlessly. Seems that AOL actually did something right.... more likely someone over at Blogger, but let's give AOL the benefit of the doubt...

I put one last entry up over on my AOL Journal and plan to leave it up till the final day so people will be able to find my 'forwarding address'.

I named my imported blog Adventures of an Eclectic Mind - The 1st and don't plan to post over there. I am going to continue to post here and leave that blog as a collection of memories from the AOL years. I did put up one entry over there explaining what the blog was, what AOL did, and directing people here...... An era ends and a new one begins

The Deathrows of AOL Journals....

Yes, yes, yes... I know I promised stories from my great adventure, but I seem to have returned to find something of a disaster happening in J-land. It seems that AOL has decided that the Journal product, along with all of the Hometown stuff, is to be discontinued. In other words they are kicking us out. I can't say that this is totally unexpected. I have been pessimistically mirroring all of my entries on a Blogger Blog for a long time now, every since the Banner fiasco. After the way AOL handled that, I wasn't sure I trusted them to stick around and support the Journals product. It seems that unfortunately my paranoia was not so unfounded after all.

At first glance this seemed to be a pain, but I have been playing around with moving away from AOL for a while now and this is just the push I needed. I tend to go with the established (read easy) path unless pushed. With Journals and FTP space gone -- and I am sure AOL Pictures soon to follow-- the only thing left that I really use on AOL is my e-mail account. I will probably continue to always have that e-mail addy as long as AOL continues to support e-mail because it is the one I've had since like 1995 and everyone has it, but I see it becoming the account I check like once every couple of weeks to be sure that nothing ended up there.  Why? Because:

• I have a g-mail account, which I plan to migrate all my e-mail traffic over to
• Blogger will now be my main Blogging platform -- at least for now and until I decide to do the whole domain/host thingy -- again, I've always preferred the customization over at Blogger anyway
• I have a free Flickr account, which I will take Pro tomorrow. It's a better platform than AOL Pictures anyway and the only reason I haven't been using it is just pure laziness of habit. Plus I have been wanting to do more with my pictures over at Flickr anyway and maybe this will be the push I need to do so
• I was only using AOL FTP to host my animated graphics. I will now move those over to Photobucket
• AOL alerts were always lousy, so I have a Bloglines account up and running and have been using it for years already. Now it is just a matter of getting everyone's new Blog accounts into Bloglines and deleting out the old AOL Journal ones
• AND Live Writer is integrated with Blogger and it was always a pain having to copy and paste the entry into AOL anyway. With Blogger all I have to do is hit the publish button

So... I'm thinking maybe I should THANK AOL for being butts and kicking us out. My only fear is that some of the people I enjoy will either not continue to blog or I will miss finding where they have gone. Otherwise I think this may actually turn out to be a good move, at least for me.

If anyone who is making the move needs any help with getting their new Blogs set up, or have questions about Bloglines, Flickr, or Photobucket feel free to ask.

Another place to get help is here. Rachel has set up a bulletin board for people to help each other, ask questions, and post their forwarding links. You have to sign up for an account to post, but it is free.

This will most likely be my last post that I 'mirror' over at AOL Journals. From now on I will only be posting here. I will put one last entry up over at J-land directing all my friends over to my Blogger Blog. Eh, and an era ends.