You — yes, you — have a story to tell. It might paint a picture of sunny days and laundry flapping in the breeze, or twilight hours haunted with shadows, uncertainties, and peril. It could define your daily life, or life as you wish it were. Whatever direction your story takes, it's still your story, it's still worth telling, and it really wants to get out (even though it went into hiding every time you had to do a writing assignment in your high school English class), so make a home for your story inside an AOL Journal.
Before starting your journal, do a bit of planning. Your journal needs a few things to get off the ground:
Title: Keep this short, simple, descriptive, and creative. Your journal's title appears atop every page of your work, so both you and your visitors see a lot of it. The AOL Journals system also uses your journal's title as part of its Web address, so shorter works better than longer. You might want a journal called My Thoughts About Life, the Universe, and Peanut Butter, but when the software turns that into an address, do you really think people will type mythoughtsaboutlifetheuniverseandpeanutbutter? If you rename your journal later, it still keeps its original Web address. (Sorry, that's just part of life, the universe, and peanut butter.)
Brief description: The AOL Journals software puts the description right under your journal's title when displaying your work. Because it also feeds the description to the AOL Journals search system, make sure your description includes terms that help people find your work. If your journal covers a hobby, name the hobby. If you're famous and it's about you, put your name in there.
Community: Think about which Hometown community best fits your journal's topic. Is it business-oriented or for fun? When creating your journal, the system makes you pick one of several journal-specific community areas, but later you can list it in as many other categories as you want. (You add it to other community categories in keyword Hometown, with the Select Community button.)
E-mail addresses for your friends: When you finish making the journal, the AOL Journals system gives you a chance to e-mail an announcement message to your friends, family, and anybody else you think would care. Having a list of your friends' e-mail addresses and screen names makes this step easy. (You can send more announcements in the future, so don't fret if you overlook someone. Just remember them the next time around!)
You can make as many journals as you want for each screen name in your account — there's no maximum limit. Many people keep a business journal and a personal journal, plus another one for a hobby.
Check your work carefully as you create the journal — particularly the journal title. Although you can change anything you want after making your journal, you can't ever change your journal's Web address. It's permanent.
With the planning out of the way, it's time to make your journal. The whole process only takes a few minutes. Here's what to do:
1. Open the AOL Journals window by selecting Community --> Journals from the main menu or with keyword Journals.
On cue, the AOL Journals window appears.
2. Click the Create A Journal Now link.
The much larger Create a Journal window hops into action. Grab the notes you made about your journal title, description, and such, because that's next.
3. Carefully type the name of your journal.
Whatever you type becomes the permanent name of your journal, so make double sure that you spell everything right. You get one chance to change the journal's address later in Step 8, but after that, it's a done deal.
4. Press Tab to move the cursor to the Description field, and then type the description of your journal.
Keep it brief — just a sentence or a few words works fine.
5. Press Tab to move the cursor down to the Community area, and then select your journal's organizational home.
You can change this later in the Hometown window (keyword Hometown) if you decide that you don't like it or if you want to include your journal in more communities.
6. Leave the Simple Journal radio button selected. Click Next to continue.
As with the other items, you can customize your journal to the extreme after you finish creating it. For now, just go with the basics.
7. If you want to announce your new journal's creation to a bunch of friends right now, click the radio button for that.
Consider leaving this set to "No". As you probably guessed, you can always send out the invitations later, directly from the journal itself.
8. The window displays the Web address (known as the URL) for your journal. To change the address, click the Change Address button and follow the instructions.
If you change the journal's address, only put letters, numbers, or dashes into the name. Sorry, but that's one of the Internet rules.
9. Write down the address for your journal, and then click Finish to complete the process.
After a few moments, your new journal appears on-screen, stunning in its blankness.
If you forget to write down your journal's Web address, go to keyword Hometown and double-click on your journal's entry in the Sites list at the top of the window. Your journal opens in a new window.
Keep a link to your journal handy by adding it as an icon on your toolbar. Just open your journal like normal, and then drag the little heart icon from the top of the journal window into the customizable section (the right side) of the toolbar. Pick an icon to use, and then type a brief label, such as Journal, for your entry. Click Save to finish the process. After that, just click your new button to nip straight into your journal.
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