I mentioned previously that we’ve migrated all Premium users and campaign contributors over to the Xanga 2.0 servers.

In addition, we also have prepared downloadable archives for the ~2 million Xanga blogs saved on our servers… specifically:

* We generated blog archives for every Xangan who has signed into the site in the past 5 years, as long as they have more than two subscribers (to rule out spam).
* We also generated blog  archives for every Xangan who has signed into the site in the past year, and has at least ten blogs overall.

We are currently working to make these archives available asap to all of our users (for free, of course). We’ve been working on this all day, and hope to have it available soon. There will be two ways to retrieve your data.

1) Once we launch this feature, you will be able to sign into Xanga and download the archive (for free) from the link at the top of your dashboard, or

2) Upgrade to Xanga 2.0 and we will upgrade your blog to the new servers using the data in the backup.

Let me know if you have any questions!

ps We’ve been tuning the servers all day to run faster… let us know if you can feel a difference in the site speed!

Welcome to the official launch of Xanga 2.0!

Here’s how to get started:

1. SIGNIN

You can sign into your Xanga account right here:

* http://xanga.com/wp-login.php

You can use the same username and password that you’re used to, and it should work!

2. CHECK OUT YOUR BLOG

If you are premium or participated in our Xanga 2.0 campaign, your blog should be in the same location!  For example, my blog is here:
http://john.xanga.com

If your blog appears, you should be able to go to your dashboard and start blogging!  Your blog should even look similar to your old theme.  (If it looks a bit off, let us know here and we’ll take a look!)
http://help.xanga.com/forum/themes

If your blog doesn’t appear (and you are either premium or contributed to our campaign), please let us know in our help forum and we will look into it!
http://help.xanga.com/forum/data-migration

3. CHECK OUT YOUR READING PAGE (TO READ POSTS)

Either way, you should be able to check out your Reading page under your dashboard!

It’s a great way to find updates from your subs and friends!  Speaking of which, we made some name changes related to subs and friends, to help make it a bit simpler and more intuitive… you can read about the name tweaks here!

ps  Thanks for your patience everyone… we will find a way to make it up to you!!

pps We are now officially in phase 2 (of four) of the Xanga 2.0 launch!

Phase 1: Data Migration
Phase 2: Site Tuning  <—
Phase 3: Feature Prioritization
Phase 4: Building Together

The next month or two of work on Xanga 2.0 is going to be busy, so we wanted to share with everyone a roadmap of how we’re thinking about things… if you’re interested, you can read more details about the 4 phases here

The next month or two of work on Xanga 2.0 is going to be busy, so I wanted to share with everyone a roadmap of how we’re thinking about things!

We’re dividing the work on this project into four basic phases.

Phase 1. Data migration

As described here, we’ve imported over every account that we have on Xanga over to the new system so that anyone who could sign into Xanga can still sign into Xanga 2.0.  (Try it here!)  We’ve also imported over everyone’s subscribers and friends, so that if somebody was subscribed or friended to you on the old system, they’re now following you on the new one too.  And f you had turned on privacy features like friends lock, then we imported that over as well.  Same goes for Signin Lock, RSS feeds being on or off, and search engine accessibility.   We’ve also migrated over everyone’s photos (25 terabytes+ of data).

Finally and most important of all, we’ve imported over 2 million blogs from the old system.  If you are premium or if you pledged to our campaign, then we’ve already imported your blog posts into Xanga 2.0. If you don’t fit into the category but you’ve been active on the site in the following ways, we’ve created a backup archive of your blog data and can migrate you to the system if you’d like.  Continue reading →

Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about what the difference is between Subscribing to someone and being Friends with them. As you guys know:

* You Subscribe to someone when you want to follow all of their updates on their blog.
* You Friend someone (and they friend you back) to create a closer relationship. Friendships also control privacy features (like Friends Lock) and are two-way relationships: you can’t just friend someone… they have to agree to friend you back.

Both features let you do some pretty cool things. So we made a list of what we like most about them:

* The ability to easily see someone else’s updates
* The privacy of being able to approve people before they can see your content.

That said, it definitely confused people that both features did something similar and yet had such different names… and also that there was no one place to manage them both.   So we addressed the first by tweaking the name… and renamed subs and friends into a single feature called, you guessed it, Following and Approved Followers.

It really works very similar to how Xanga worked before, but with just a new name:

Continue reading →