June 28, 2011

• Easier User Tagging with @Username

  We just launched the updated user-tagging system we wrote about earlier this week.

  Now you can just add an "@" symbol in front of any username, and we'll automatically convert it into a linked user tag (pointing to that user's site). A few notes about this new system:

  • works in weblog posts and pulses
  • works in weblog titles too - it won't link to the username inside the title (because the whole title is already linked to the comments page for the post), but it'll alert the username who you tagged
  • works with "private drafts" - a lot of folks use the "private" status on weblog entries as a "draft" status while they are actively working on the post... username tags will *not* trigger alerts to those usernames while any post remains private. But the first time you make the post public (i.e. when you finally make your "draft" live) the alerts will then get sent
  • some trickiness with future posts - in future posts, any username tags *will* get automatically linked when the post finally gets published, but alerts will not get sent... We didn't want to send alerts when you first teed up the post because the recipient wouldn't be able to read the post (it isn't published yet!). But it turns out it'd take a pretty big overhaul of our future posting system to trigger alerts when the posts finally do get published... Just an FYI - we're still looking into this one.

  If you're not keen on getting alerted when people tag you, you can turn off or limit your alerts here:

  http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountsettings.aspx

  Thanks to @justin for programming this one!

  Let us know what you think.

  Marc

  • 4:40 pm
  • 31 Comments