For those of you using Xanga Themes, your profile page now matches your theme - *woohoo*. As of right now, all of the "main pages" of your Xanga Site (the ones you hit when you click your username or any of the major navigation links - "weblog", "photos", "videos", etc.) support themes. We're working on the remaining, unthemed comments and tag pages now. Major props go out to Bharat for all of his hard work.

Update and clarification to the last post: Search engine *bots* are filtered out of your site's footprints, but you'll still be able to see hits from people who search for your site using engines like Google and MSN. If you'd like to change your privacy settings to allow or forbid search engines from indexing your site, you can do so here. Hope this clears up any confusion!

Good news! Major improvements to footprints took place this week - now you can search up to nine days' worth of page visits and (drumroll, please) search engines are now filtered out of your footprint listings.

Dave confirmed today that about 40% of his Xanga site's traffic came from search engines. If your total number of footprints has gone down or fluctuated strangely this week, this is probably the reason why.

Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Did you know? Today is actually the 25th anniversary of the emoticon  (via mashable).

To celebrate, we're launching a new rich-text comment box for Xanga Themes! It has baked in support for smileys (of course) and also works on a lot more browsers*.

If you're using a Xanga Theme, then you'll see the new comment box on all your weblog comment pages. We'll be adding it to other comment pages (photos, videos, etc.) as we add theme support to those pages as well.

Leave a comment below to try it out!

- Marc

* Tested in IE6, IE7 and Firefox 2 on a PC plus Safari 2, Safari 3 and Firefox 2 on a Mac - seems to be working, but of course please let us know if you're having any troubles (please be sure to empty your cache and refresh your page first to make sure you have the latest javascript files).

P.S. Special thanks to Justin for programming this feature

Did you know that blogrings are the second biggest source of traffic to Xanga sites?

You already know that the blogrings you've joined are made up of like-minded people, but you may not know that you can submit weblogs, photos and videos directly into those blogrings.

Got something relevant to your blogring that you want to share with the group? Just submit it to the blogring pool ("share" under your weblog entry). It's also a good way to increase traffic to your site and meet other cool Xangans.

Here are a few blogrings that are already using blogring pools - now try it yourself!

Been wondering what you've been blogging about for all these years? Have you ever wanted to find all your blogs about a specific topic? Try tagging!

As some of you already know, tagging is an option that lets you assign keywords (or brief descriptions) to your posts for future access.

On your weblog entry page, insert your tags into the box below your blog post. They'll automatically attach to your posts and can be searched using a module or by visiting xanga.com/YourUsername/tags. It's a practical way for you to categorize your posts and for interested readers to find them more easily.

Now I know that I've written about NYC and the featured questions a few too many times. My bad.

-Natalia

Spend your weekends on Xanga productively (instead of watching the roller coaster video on Featured Content over and over like I've been doing).

If you're not just an English speaker, share your knowledge! Xanga Translation is an ongoing project designed to let everyone experience the site in his or her own native language.

Check it out - I've been adding to the French section and giggling at the nuances of Pirate wordage - to add translations for all kinds of Xanga-related phrases.

Danke schoen/merci/gracias/domo arigato/grazie/hvala/xie-xie.

(that means "thanks")

-Natalia

We're hosting a huge blue frog for the weekend to celebrate the 1000th theme submitted to the theme directory - congratulations to leogirl34, who designed this cool theme!

Soon after we added the ability to share your themes, we got the following feature request:

"Now that the Themes Directory is open to all, could we please have a 'My Themes' module to add to our page? Something that would link to our themes in the directory and theme thumbnails linked to preview each theme?" (via the themes forum)

Thanks to adam, here it is!

If you add the new "Themes" module to your page, you'll get instant access to all of the themes you've submitted to the themes directory (i.e. all the themes that other users can share). The new module comes with a thumbnail screenshot of your theme, stats on how many people have previewed and saved each theme, and one-click links for any xanga user to preview your theme.

Design away!

We got a great comment on a recent post:

"would be nice if this site used a theme with a less-tiny font "
9/11/2007 3:45 AM  - sean

We'll definitely choose a theme with a bigger font. In fact, we plan to vary the theme on this site pretty regularly using cool themes from the xanga theme directory - if there's a particular theme you think we should use, please let us know in the comments!

But I thought this might be a good opportunity to mention a few important points for everyone to keep in mind when designing (or using) themes for their Xanga Sites (or any other website):

[Disclaimer: these suggestions are just the tip of the iceberg for building "accessible" websites, and we've actually baked many more accessibility features into the Xanga Themes system (perhaps we'll create a "web accessibility" series to discuss them here?). But if you'd like to dig deeper, "Web Accessibility" over on Wikipedia is a good place to start.]

• Use Contrasting Colors - it may look neat to have silvery (dark grey) writing on a black background, but it's super hard to read. The human eye sees best when there are strong boundaries... and the best way to get strong boundaries around your text is to make sure it's a distinctly different ("contrasting") color from whatever color lies beneath it
• Use a Big Text Size - no explanation needed here - bigger text just tends to be easier to read - but here's a tricker one...
• Allow Text Resizing by the Browser - most modern browsers offer a setting that lets you make text on any website appear smaller or larger than the default size used by the designer. BUT good ol' IE6 [molto sarcasm again] lets designers *lock* the text size on the page (often inadvertently). The Xanga Themes system is built to overcome this problem with IE6 - all themes built using the Xanga Themes Remixer should automagically allow for text resizing in IE6.

So, which theme (with bigger text) should we use for this site?

Thanks!
Marc

This past week, the most common questions sent to Xanga Support have been about how to enable Xanga Lock and how to change your site from a photo/videoblog to a regular weblog.

Here's what you need to know:

Xanga Lock

Xanga Lock is an easy way to make sure only Xanga viewers can read your blog. To enable it, go to your account information here and enter your password at the prompt.

You've got several options here – choose the one that’s best for you – and you can change these at any time.

Changing from a photo/videoblog to a regular weblog

Xanga Themes are designed to give you the maximum possible control over both the look of your site and what content you choose to highlight. We've put different types of content into little boxes called "modules," and you can add, remove or move those modules anywhere you want on a themed page. Still with us?

When you first set up your site, it asked which type of blog you wanted to highlight. This option really just determined which of your "blog" modules (weblog, photoblog or videoblog) would go front and center on your site. If you've changed your mind since then, no problem.

To make your weblog module front and center (instead of your photo or video module), you have two options:

• Just go through the setup wizard again - you can actually go through the setup wizard whenever you want! Just sign in, click the Setup Wizard link, and choose to highlight your weblog instead of your photos or videos. Keep in mind, though, this will reset all your other modules. If you've done any custom work, you might want to try the second approach.

• Edit your modules manually - if you want to add a weblog module to your page and display it prominently, here's what to do:

  1. Go to your Xanga Site and click on "edit this page" (you should see it in your top toolbar).
  2. Click the "Add Modules" tab on the little "remixer" panel that drops down.
  3. Click on the module (little button) that says "Weblog".

  This will add the weblog module to your page, which you can then move anywhere you want.You’ve also got the option to add other modules, including custom ones you can design yourself.