The first big blogging project we did with AOL before they bought Weblogs, Inc. was our Live8 blog. The first big blogging project we did after AOL bought our company was Blogging Stocks -- and it pushed the platform to new heights.
Unlike most of the one template blogs in our network where every page has the same structure, Blogging Stocks was the first to use two templates. One was for the main site which carried all of the news and the second one was stock-specific. If you used a ticker symbol in the URL instead of "www" like aapl.bloggingstocks.com for Apple Inc., you would get a giant box with stock chart data, details on the company, a competitor list and links to resources like message boards, quotes, headlines and Google Finance tools.
In order to pull in stock chart data from AOL's center in Ireland, we also had to teach Blogsmith to parse raw XML instead of just simple RSS feeds. Mike, Celly and Gavin did a tremendous job on the integration and it gave me a lot of confidence that we would be doing amazing work with AOL.
We gave one of my favorite blog producers over to Blogging Stocks permanently, Sarah Gilbert. She was a co-lead blogger on Blogging Baby with Niki for a long time and she also has an MBA from Wharton, so she was a perfect fit for managing our high-profile business blog. Adding in Amey Stone who I used to work with at BusinessWeek and putting it under the guidance of Marty Moe, who runs AOL Money and Finance and now runs all of Weblogs, Inc., and we had a site that I was very proud of.
Last night my old team launched a fantastic new redesign of Blogging Stocks. The stock-specific charts aren't as prominent as they used to be and they added these fantastic Autoblog-style tabs at the top that give you two-click access to all of the different companies they follow. It's cleaner and I love the new arrangement (see below).
After clicking around on it a bunch this morning, the only bad thing I can find is that AOL's ad team thinks it's okay to abuse readers with a "take this survey" pop-up ad on every page I load. Ouch.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance
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Matt Heerema 536 days ago
Thanks for the writeup Brian. I think this redesign is nearly as big a leap forward for Weblogs Inc as the original design was. New levels of integration withing the AOL hierarchy, new pushes forward with different Web technologies. The first design with an actual full team of designers (diylife.com was done by a new designer as well, but this one had all three of us on board.)
Glad you like it. Sorry about the surveys :(. Wish I could do something about that.