Weblog

Saturday, 11 May 2013

  • Post-mortem on yesterday's downtime

    We had some downtime yesterday for some users, and wanted to share a post-mortem on what happened.

    Early yesterday morning, we got some reports that some Xangans couldn't reach Xanga.com.  We were able to quickly confirm it ourselves, and also confirm that traffic was significantly down.  However, there were still a good number of users who *were* able to reach the website... we could see them showing up in our server logs.  Plus the site came up for us on our iPhones, even though it was down on our PCs.
     
    So the servers were still up, but some users weren't able to reach them.  That was a huge clue.  About 3 anxiety attacks later, we were able to ascertain that most likely, the routing table on one of our bandwidth providers was broken.  We got in touch with them and they were able to fix the issue... and service was restored to all.
     
    We have been exploring alternatives to our current hosting setup.  More on that soon... but in the meantime, wanted to share this post-mortem with you guys.  If you experienced any downtime yesterday, we are very sorry!
     
    Please let us know how the site is working for you now!

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

  • Fighting splogs, and some proposed tweaks to the registration process

    Hey guys -

    We've been getting hit pretty hard by spam blogs lately, aka splogs. A lot of the times the sploggers will just create a site and then... do nothing. Most of the account don't try to spam anyone; instead, they just sit there with a link in their profile. We have shut down a lot of these so-called "splogs", but they just keep coming.  The worst part of splogs is that they are created in such a way that they are slowing down our themes database. As a result, some of our REAL users are having trouble creating accounts or editing their theme  

    To help address this, we're looking into ways that we can prove that our new users are actually real people. We already have a CAPTCHA in place, but apparently there are now companies in China and India that do nothing but hire humans to defeat CAPTCHA tests.  We've tried a number of technical fixes, but a lot of times the technical fixes prevent real users from being able to register accounts. :(

    So we've had to switch gears a bit.  After some brainstorming, we've come up with a few new ways we can try and prevent these humans-for-hire from creating fake accounts: More Here...

Thursday, 27 December 2012

  • Meebo Chatbar

    Hey guys - we've loved hosting Xanga chat through our partner at Meebo, but they were acquired by Google this year and are changing their product priorities.  As a result, they've contacted us about turning off our chat bar... 

    We've been looking into chat usage, and it's actually used by very few of our members.  And we've been investigating, and turning off the chat feature should make Xanga sites load a bit faster.  So we're going to be turning off the chat feature this afternoon.

    Let us know if you come away with a faster browsing experience overall!

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

  • Request For Comment On Proposed Revenue Stream

    Hey everybody,
     
    We're trying something new to make more money to support Xanga.
     
    Say you link to an Amazon product in a blog post. Here's the new part: we're going to be adding Xanga's affiliate codes to *some* of those product links.
     
    Which links? Well, if you've already added your own affiliate code to that product link, we won't be adding our affiliate code.
     
    Also, if your account has Xanga Premium, we won't add our affiliate code to your links ever.
     
    Only in cases where you haven't linked using an affiliate code *and* you're a Classic member will we sometimes add an affiliate code.
     
    I think this is an nice way for Xanga to make a little more money, without having a negative impact on the user experience. I don't expect Xanga to make a huge amount of money from this, but an increasing number of Xanga readers are using ad blockers. Hopefully, this will help replace that revenue stream for us. We're looking to try this out as a test sometime this week.
     
    I'm hoping this will help the site support itself over the coming year, and serve as a counterpoint to the ad blocking that we're seeing.  We work really hard to keep ads here as unobtrusive as possible, and I am hopeful that this fits the bill.
     
    Could you guys let us know what you think before we move forward here?  Thanks...
     
    Thanks,
    Bob

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

  • Update: Xanga's New Jersey Datacenter Is On Emergency Generators

    WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Xanga's datacenter is now back on utility power! So we are no longer dependent on the emergency backup generators... Woohoo!

    The backup generators would have run out of fuel at some point, so it's great to be back on utility power.

    We're not totally out of the woods yet, since our datacenter needs to fix one of its backup generators in case utility power flakes out again. Also, I suppose our datacenter also needs to replace all that diesel fuel they've used up...

    But we're making progress!

    Hooray for electricity!

    Thanks,
    Bob

    ~~~

    Hi Everybody,

    I hope everybody is safe with Hurricane Sandy!

    I wanted to give a quick update on what we know about how the hurricane has affected Xanga...

    Our servers are located in a datacenter in Newark, New Jersey, which was hit especially hard with power losses and flooding.

    The good news is that our servers seem to be OK. They're located on the 8th floor, so they should be safe from flooding.

    There are two bits of bad news.

    The first bit is that our bandwidth provider ran into difficulties from 2am to 10am EST today. So even though Xanga's servers have been online the whole time, you may have run into problems connecting to the site. It's possible that our network provider might run into more problems, but for now, the network seems to be OK, which is great.

    The second bit of bad news is that our datacenter has lost utility power. So Xanga's servers are currently operating on emergency backup generators.

    Hopefully, utility power will be restored before the emergency backup generators lose power!

    There are two risks here. First, our datacenter's backup generators are in the basement of the building, along with the diesel fuel and fuel pumps. So there's a risk of flooding, which would disable the backup generators. At this point, we think this risk is minimal, but you never know...

    Second, the generators may run out of fuel before utility power is restored. This would obviously take our servers offline.

    We'll keep you updated as we learn more!

    In the meantime, stay safe everybody!

    Thanks,
    Bob

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