Journals R9 Update: Shiny!

Stephanie just blogged about our latest Journals R9 update, which has escaped from beta and is currently rampaging throughout our production servers on journals.aol.com.  The most visible change is the new, less blue color scheme.  There are a lot of less visible changes.  One of them is that we now support HTTP authentication for both RSS and Atom feeds -- so if you are a reader of someone's private Journal and use a feed reader that supports it, you can get their daily thoughts delivered to your computer automatically, just like you can for public Journals.  Does your feed reader support it?  If it's web based, probably not.  Otherwise, it probably does.

Here's a bonus Easter Egg, just for fun.  You can apply a theme to any Journals page by adding an argument "?skin=css url" to the page URL.  Like this.  Or this, or this... or anything over at the AIMPages themes directory.  It shows a direction we're headed; not the end of a journey, but the start of a trip.

We've also updated our whitelist to allow more cool widgets to be put in your posts and About Me box.  I just added one of the neater ones -- MyBlogLog's Recent Readers widget.  I've put it on my sidebar as an experiment; is it cool, or just weird, to see your visits being tracked and displayed?  (Hi Frank!)