September 3, 2013

• The Four Phases of the Xanga 2.0 Launch!

  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. 

  * We’ve archived the blogs of the hundreds of thousands of blogs where the user has logged in in the past 5 years and has at least two subscribers.
  * We did an additional set of archives for 200k users who had logged in the past year and had at least 10 blogs.
  * We’ve also archived the blogs of every single user that’s ever been premium at any point in the past…

  And of course, a lot of you guys archived your own blogs using the old Xanga archive generator.  If you send that to us, we can always import you that way as well.

  We''ve just finished the core of Phase 1 tonight, and will commence with Phase 2 upon launching the site!

  Phase 2. Site tuning

  Once we go live tonight, we anticipate that it's going to take some time for the dust to settle.  It's always a bit tricky to tune your servers to match the amount of load that's being put on it. So during this phase, we will allocate servers and storage to best match the load that's being put on it.

  We'll also work with anyone whose data didn't make it over to get them onto the new system as quickly as possible!  We'll be streamlining this process over the next week...

  Phase 3. Feature Prioritization

  We have really and truly focused on migrating over the very core features of Xanga as well as as much of the data as we could physically port over.  In some cases, we had to port over the features *in order to* be able to move the data at all; for example, we built a subscriptions engine (and merged friends and subs into it) so that we could import over all of the subscriptions and friendships over from Xanga!

  Once we get all of the site data and servers stabilized, we'd love to work with you guys to pull together a list of features that you like to see on the site... and then prioritize them.  For example:

  * We are keen to make a front page that features everyone's content… It could be a simple recent weblogs module or it could be a feature weblogs module like we had before. Something like this is a top priority for us and we'd love to work with you guys to make sure that we're designing it just right.

  * Also, we are launching with a very basic theme that we hope matches the look of your old theme.  So another top priority for us is to upgrade the theme into a more easily customizable theme system that is both powerful and yet intuitive and simple.

  Are these features you'd like to see right away?  We'd love to hear from you on which features you'd like to see, so please chime in below.

  Phase 4. Building together

  Once we've prioritized which features to build, we'd love to get some of you guys involved as beta testers, customer service helpers, and all the other roles we discussed here.  Please let us know below what role you'd be interested in playing, and we can setup group blogs where we can all interact.

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  We're currently in Phase 2: Server Tuning...  wish us all luck tonight and in the days ahead!  And thanks to everyone for your patience and support in making this all happen!

  • 4:01 am
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