AOL Syndrome

by Kris

AOL has very quietly implemented their Home Page publisher, and another service called Personal Publisher (PP).

Unfortunately, they seem to have two different groups working on them.  One is known as "My Place" and the other is "My Home Page."

The latter, "My Home Page," is little more than a conversion of your Online Profile to a web page with an area where you can add your own insipid comments.  What they don't make clear is that you can make your own web page completely independently of this product.

Interestingly, a href to news:alt.aol-sucks can be seen from within AOL, but not outside of AOL in the "My Home Page" service.  What do you know about that!?

"My Place" is your own two megabyte FTP site.  This is where things get confusing.  "My Place" exists on a server called users.aol.com and was apparently intended to be an FTP server alone.  A note for FTP uploaders - with "My Place" comes the ability to upload FTP files from AOL.  Yippee.  Yawn.  Anyway, as I said, "My Place" is on users.aol.com, but "My Home Page" is on home.aol.com.

In various parts of the AOL documentation and help files, Personal Publisher is used to describe both services.  It's still not clear if PP is used to create a web page on users.aol.com or home.aol.com or if PP is a downloaded file that you use to create your custom HTML file to upload to "My Place" (see below).

A curious feature of the "My Place" personal FTP site is mentioned in the FAQ you get the first time you start "My Place" but nowhere else.  Users who log in anonymously can get to you by logging in as anonymous or ftp and changing to directory: /screenname

The FTP daemon is a customized one that will not list all FTP sites, which is stated in the documentation.  Sorry, Spam King, you can't get AOL names from here!

users.aol.com doubles as an HTTP server with your FTP site as the current HTML directory.  All you do is place a file called index.html in your "My Place" FTP site and you have a completely custom web page that you write from scratch by yourself offline using either a text editor or a tool like HoTMetaL Pro

So, users.aol.com/kjrehberg hits my custom web site.  However, home.aol.com/kjrehberg gets my "Personal Publisher" web page, which is a completely different web page!

And finally, ftp://users.aol.com/krehberg gets my FTP site.  Some browsers will pick up the index.html even on an FTP URL so you get the web site instead.

Now back to users.aol.com, the custom web page and FTP site.  The users.aol.com machine is in fact an arbiter which assigns your HTTP and FTP socket connection requests not to users.aol.com but to a number of HTTP servers apparently to handle the tremendous load that 1000 people, much less 3.5 million, could put on a web page.

This kind of setup happens throughout AOL, and probably happens on the "other" web service, home.aol.com.  Whatever.  When the little guys' slave to users.aol.com crashes (which happened to me whilst uploading my custom home page) you get the usual .nfsXXXXX NFS server stale handle file as when any other NFS client crashes.  Pretty interesting.  AOL is pretty secretive about their systems, choosing only to describe them as "Open Systems," but these web pages are served with some flavor of UNIX.

AOL wants to be the world's Internet provider.  With these tools and the new CNN service, it appears AOL truly wants to bring HTML, FTP, and the rest of the Internet to regular people at the expense of more experienced folks who have long since left AOL, or are holding out for a feature or two.  Probably the most embarrassing tactic an anti-AOL pundit could use is to set up a custom home page that uses HTML 3.0 tags to demonstrate how AOL's own web browser can't even display one of its own web pages now that AOL has admitted that it can't meet the specs for HTML 2.0 and Netscapese!