We need to perform maintenance on the servers today to resolve some issues that are causing some intermittent problems.
The site will be down starting at 2:45PM EST and will be back up before 3:00PM EST.
BTW, Xanga had the least amount of donwtime in all of 2008* of the major social networks:
Social network downtime in 2008
(*Imeem had less downtime than us in the chart but they were only tracked for part of the year.)
We've been going through the Top Ideas, and picking off the ones that we can do quickly 
.
1. FIXING PHOTO MANAGER BUG
First, we started with this bug report:
Good eye. It's all fixed now - thanks Delphiki!
2. MAKE LINKS IN PULSE CLICKABLE
Then we moved to Idea #10:
It's working now! You can check out Justin's test pulse here:
3. XANGA MOBILE
Finally, Jonathan asked for a Xanga Mobile app:
We actually have a Xanga Mobile app available through a partner as a subscription service. Xanga Mobile supports all the major carriers in the US, I believe. You can find it on the frontpage; there's a module called "Xanga Mobile". Just put your phone number in there and see if they support your handset.
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Thanks to everyone for all the awesome ideas. We just crossed the 10k line: there are now over 10k votes on all the various Xanga Ideas! Simply amazing... keep 'em coming.
We'll be picking off a few of the bigger Idea projects over the next month or two (including TheTheologiansCafe's idea for improving footprints that we mentioned in the last post). We're also in the process of moving our physical servers (hence the increase in site maintenance lately)... so that's keeping us busy. Thanks to Dan, Jon and Janet for staying up late to lift those heavy servers!
But in the meantime, we wanted to get some more quick bug fixes and new features out there, to show that we're taking Xanga Ideas very seriously.
Happy New Year to everyone on Xanga!
John
The response to Xanga Ideas over the past week has been awesome! 258 ideas and 4,663 votes so far .
We've been responding with "staff comments" like crazy, but thought a more public response might be useful.
Fix bug with pulse commenting + backspacing
There was a bug where if you left a pulse comment and then backspaced, the pulse comment would doublepost (in certain browsers).
We give special priority to bug reports, so this was the first big Idea we tackled. After much debugging, we have fixed most occurrences of this bug! It does seem to happen now and then (although much more rarely now), so we're not going to close out the Idea. But we've made huge progress! Hopefully your pulsing is a much smoother process now.
Display Total Footprints/Views
TheTheologiansCafe asked for a way to display your Total Footprints/Views in your profile module, and it is now our #1 Idea. We'll work on it! It's a bit tricky to do this, so we'll have to brainstorm ways over the holidays. Continue reading
Justin and Chris have just launched Xanga Ideas, the new democratic way for Xangans to propose and vote on features:
Any Xangan can propose or vote on any idea. (Thanks to everyone for helping us brainstorm ways to best build this!) We were going to have all sorts of controls on who could vote, but then we just decided that there are simpler ways to detect voter fraud. We'll just display who votes for a particular idea in a side module; that way, it should be pretty easy to detect wrongdoing.
Here are some of the cool ideas we've put in there so far (you have to be signed in to see these for now):
Have your own idea for a feature that would make Xanga better? Please help us by proposing and voting on software features you'd like to see on the site!
We've been reviewing everyone's feedback on the Xanga Ideas project, and as we kinda expected... the comments are tilting towards Democratic Elections over a Features Marketplace. I guess that's not surprising, since the Great Recession of 2008 has shaken so many peoples' faith in free markets. Plus let's be honest, some of you are hoarders and don't want to give up any credits .
There were a lot of really thoughtful comments discussing the pros and cons of Feature Elections versus Feature Marketplaces. We had leaned towards Marketplaces at first, but then started to swing towards Elections as we read the comments. We wanted to come up with a hybrid approach, but that seemed impossible. Every attempt to marry credits with voting/elections begins to sound like a potential bribe or corruption scandal!
Then it hit us - maybe we can do both after all:
This way, votes are free and cost nothing... but people who feel strongly about a feature can still use their credits to promote it as a plug. And the best part is, each person who saw the plug would still be free to make their own decision on whether or not to vote for the feature.
Most of all, we would hope to create discussions all around Xanga and in the Ideas area around the pros and cons of each feature. People could read the discussions, and decide whether or not they want to support the feature. The perfect Jeffersonian democracy .
Well at least, that's the dream. We hope it's a good compromise that taps the collective wisdom of the community in a powerful way.
What say you?
We get a lot of ideas and suggestions sent into Xanga, which is fantastic. We review every idea and implement as many as we can. In addition to ideas that are emailed or PM'd to us, I also pride myself on subbing to lots of users who are *ahem* very vocal about what they'd like to see changed or improved on the site. It's definitely worth it though, because we often get our best feedback from irritated users. We implement a huge number of feature requests and bug fixes, and try really hard to listen to you guys.
We recently realized though, that the process with which we receive and prioritize feedback isn't transparent. Even if we're implementing all of your ideas, you wouldn't necessarily know it! So we started looking around at more transparent systems for proposing and prioritizing ideas. One of the ones we discovered was Change.org, a Digg-like site to let Americans propose and vote on ideas to change America. It's neat to see some of the top-rated ideas bubble up:
It's a pretty neat system, but not all of them are so profound. #3: Pass the Puppy Uniform Protection Statute to Help Stop Puppy Mills? I mean, puppy mills are totally wrong... but I'm not sure that's the third highest priority for America. It seems like someone with an interest in animal rights has proposed and voted up a number of Ideas that are in the top 20 ("Stop The Live Skinning of Animals everywhere", "Strengthen the Animal Welfare Act, Increase Funding and Penalties, and Remove Exemptions", and "Provide Legal Protections for Animals Through the Animal Bill of Rights"). All admirable goals, but I'm not sure that animal rights should be 20% of the top 20 policy initiatives in our country.
So... we could use your advice. We're looking to build a system where anyone can add an idea, and then other people can help prioritize it. We have two general approaches: Continue reading
Some questions have popped up about Featured Content, so I wanted to clarify a few things!
How do I get Featured?
We now have two different areas where we feature content.
1) Most Discussed: We automatically feature the 10 most commented posts in the right module. We focus on the most popular posts from the past 24 hours (we limit it to one per person).
2) Manually Selected: We also manually select Featured Weblogs in the middle of the page.
Ok then, how do I get a blog post onto the Featured Content module on the right?
It's just a matter of comments. Also, make sure the post has been written in the past 24 hours! If you wrote the post a long time and just updated the timestamp, that doesn't count...
I did write a post and it got a ton of comments, but it didn't appear in Featured Content!
It's because your content is too liberal/conservative. JUST KIDDING!
Continue reading
You know those little Snap Shot previews that show on Xanga pages? We're gonna go ahead and turn them off for now.
We know that some of you guys did like the previews, so we're leaving them available as an option for now. If you want to re-enable them, you can go ahead and do that here:
We made a few tweaks to the frontpage:
Mostly, the changes are to really focus the page on blogging:
We also made some design tweaks to match the look of the Top Blogs page, which we launched a few weeks ago. Some people mentioned that the font looks a bit big? We'll try it out for a few days and if it still seems big to everyone... then we'll tamp it down a bit.
The HTML and CSS for this page is much cleaner and smaller. We've made similar tweaks to other pages, and pageviews shot up 10% since the pages loaded faster! So we're excited about that.
Overall, we're trying to focus the frontpage on weblogs and make it load faster. What do you think?
We've been bringing Xanga back to its roots as a blogging community.
As part of that, we asked a bunch of you for feedback about one of our
earliest features: blogrings.
The answer was clear; the vast majority of you use blogrings almost
exclusively to find other xangans who share your interests. So we
cleaned up the page a bit to focus on that, making the list of users
higher up and more prominent on the page. While we were at it, we also added a neat new feature (thanks to Justin!) which shows you related blogrings.
It's pretty neat - say you're in an awesome blogring like this one:
Related blogrings looks at what blogrings other members of your
blogring are in... and *shazam* - it recommends you check out equally
dope blogrings like this one (see what I mean - I seriously used to be
gangster):
Seriously though - if you're checking out a digital photograph blogring, you can see other blogrings you might be interested in. It doesn't just match you to blogrings with similar titles - it actually uses math to find blogrings that have similar members. It's a pretty cool way to meet new Xangans.
Basically, blogrings will focus on their OG and continued purpose: to
help you find other Xangans who share your interests. Let us know what
you think!
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