Hey guys – the deadline for the Xanga 2.0 fundraiser is coming up… at midnight tonight!
The technical work around the site migration has been intense, and we’ve had our heads down working like crazy on the tech side of things. With the deadline imminent though, I wanted to come up for air and give everyone an update on where we are with both the Xanga 2.0 site migration and the fundraiser.
XANGA 2.0 SITE MIGRATION
Thanks to the hard work of our engineers, we’ve made tremendous progress in migrating our backend to WordPress!
You can see just how far we’ve come in the following video I just pulled together. It shows my computer screen as I browse all of the blog posts we’ve imported for my own blog at john.xanga.com.
We have now successfully moved over all of our user accounts into the new Xanga 2.0 system, so that each and every one of our current users will be able to sign into the new Xanga. We have also successfully imported the blogs of all of our current premium users… and are now working on importing the blog posts of people who have pledged to support our fundraiser. (If you haven’t gotten an email already asking about which accounts you’d like to migrate over, you should be getting one very shortly!)
We are also migrating over every single photo that’s on our servers now, which has been a ton of work. As part of that, we’ve been able to set up a cluster of media servers that we can use to serve photos moving forward. We’ll also use these servers to serve everyone’s avatars, which we are moving over as well.
There have been a huge number of technical hurdles that we’ve had to figure out, and it looks like we are in the final stretch! It’s taking us a little longer than we had hoped, but we were also able to negotiate an extension of our current lease at our networking facility… so we have an extra month (until the end of August) to finalize this transition.
We will know more on the remaining technical issues shortly, and then we will be able to set a final date for the changeover.
FUNDRAISER
At this point, we are just a few thousand dollars short of raising $50,000! We can’t thank you all enough for your incredible support and bringing us so close to our target of $60k. I have decided that if we can reach $50,000 in total pledges, then I will personally put in the next $10,000 that we need to reach our target.
I spoke to Crowdhoster and they suggested that the easiest way to achieve this would be to lower the campaign target to $50,000. They also pointed out that if we wanted to, we could enable members to continue to pledge towards the campaign in August so that more Xangans could still migrate over to Xanga 2.0. At the current rate of funding, we are on track to hit $60k before the end of August – which is great. But we’d love to get started buying a bunch of additional servers before then, so my contribution should help get things moving asap! Since we will continue to have everyone’s data available in our networking facility through the end of August, leaving the campaign open for extra time made a lot of sense and we’ve gone ahead and enabled that.
Right now, we are at $47,770… which is just $2,230 away from our target of $50k. We still need your help to reach our campaign target of $50k, so please consider contributing today!
* https://xanga.crowdhoster.com/relaunch-xanga
Quick note: no credit cards will be charged until we hit our target of $50,000! Once we hit that target though, your credit card will be charged at the time that you make a pledge towards the campaign. Just wanted to make sure that the mechanics of the fundraiser were clear, so that there wasn’t any confusion.
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Thanks to the everyone who has pledged to our campaign and who is supporting Xanga 2.0! We can’t thank you enough and are excited to bring the new site to life soon!! If you’d like to join Xanga 2.0, you can sign up here:
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