Before you start, you'll need an AOL username. If you are not already an AOL or AOL IM member, getting a username you want with AOL Journals can be a challenge, as millions of people are already AOL members and the username you want is most likely taken already. However, AOL can help suggest a username for you, which is often close to what you wanted.
Creating an AOL Journal is free, and it's a simple process that requires only a few steps. You'll need to answer questions, such as whether you want a private or public journal and what the name of the journal will be. Then you'll need to provide a brief description, select a community that your journal can belong to, and decide whether you want a simple setup or you want to ask AOL to give you more choices for colour, layout, and other design tweaks. You can change your formatting choices later if you feel your blog needs a face-lift. Finally, you'll need to tell AOL how you want your journal to look, what links you want in it, and other minor formatting issues.
AOL's WYSIWYG editing section, like other blog services', works well, but we were particularly impressed with the instant message integration that AOL offers, letting users post to their journals via AOL IM. This is a nice addition. Unfortunately, AOL won't allow you to use custom HTML in your journal and gives only rudimentary formatting options, such as the columns and the links that appear.
We liked that posted AOL blogs have an easy-to-use feature that lets people reading your blog send you comments about it. The AOL Journals service alerts you via e-mail whenever comments are posted. AOL also makes it easy for you to give people an RSS feed for your journal.
Unlike Blogger and TypePad, banner ads appear across the blog entries posted in AOL Journals. That's fine for basic personal use, but it's not recommended for businesses, since you have no control over which ads appear next to your blogs.
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