March 17, 2009

• yourusername.xanga.com

  Within the next week, Xanga is going start offering subdomains like yourusername.xanga.com as your site URL!

  We’re the only major blogging service that doesn’t use subdomains. We’ve always wanted to do it, but technically it wasn’t easy.  But Dan put it into the idea system, and it quickly jumped to the #2 idea!  So we took another look at the technical problems… and were able to solve a lot of them.

  So starting sometime later this week or next week:

  • We will change your site URL’s to yourusername.xanga.com, and
  • forward any and all links to current urls (e.g. xanga.com/john) to the new URL (john.xanga.com)

  You don’t need to do anything, and your URL will work just fine.  It will be a completely seamless change.

  What makes this exciting is that it comes with a host of advantages:

  • Google search – Google says that subdomains like john.xanga.com do better in search than subfolders like xanga.com/john… so this tweak should help drive more traffic to your site!
  • Reintroduction of Personal URL’s – It would allow us to eventually offer full URL’s.  For example, you might change the URL of your site to yourusername.com.
  • Security Flexibility – Subdomains make it easier to increase cookie security.

  But before we do any of this, we wanted to give a heads up!  All old links will be forwarded to the new URLs, so you won’t have to do anything on your end.  But we wanted to give a heads up anyway…

  If you prefer the old way – www.xanga.com/username – don’t worry you can keep using it! That url will still work fine when you type it into a browser or send it to friends.

  It’s exciting to crank out the top features in the Ideas system… hope you guys will enjoy this one!  We’ll post more details when we’re closer to rolling out the feature.

  • 8:26 pm
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