Messaging just got a whole lot easier.

Check out your messages here - you'll notice that your inbox now gives you the option to mark all your messages as read or unread...and the often requested mass deletion feature is now available! Just hit "select all" and "delete".

1000 eProps to Ayça and Justin for this one.

A couple weeks ago we posted about getting back to our roots as a blogging community.

Today we've taken our first step in that direction: we've consolidated our entire "featured" section into a new and improved "Top Blogs" page.

What does it take to be a "Top Blog"?

It involves a lot of data - including comments, views, recommendations, and other bits of information. But in general, "Top Blogs" shows the list of posts that are currently generating the most interest and discussion on Xanga.

How is it different from the old "Featured Weblogs" page?

The biggest difference is that the new page gets updated much more frequently - the new Top Blogs page is updated every 10 minutes instead of the old every 6 hours.

What about featured photos and videos?

For the time being, you can still find them here and here. But we've learned that we don't really need separate sections to show off great photos and videos - Top Blogs is where you'll already find some of the best.

Don't get us wrong, photos and videos are a hugely important part of blogging. But on Xanga, people tend to put their best photos and videos inside their blog entries.

What's up with the new design?

The design of the Top Blogs page isn't radically different from our frontpage - we've just tried to make it less cluttered and, again, more focused on blogging. Check out the new navigation, for example:

Does it do an OK job conveying that Xanga is a Blogging Community? Or are we being too subtle ?

In any event, we wanted to try any new designs on a secondary page like "Top Blogs" before mapping it onto bigger pages like our frontpage. So please let us know what you think!

And now that we've officially taken our first steps back toward "Xanga: The Blogging Community," we'd love to hear if you think we're on the right path!

We’ve just launched a new way for you to publicize your site or a friend’s site on Xanga. Plugz help you discover quality content by exposing you to bloggers that are not in your friends or subscriptions lists. You can link to any publicly accessible page on Xanga or on one of the websites powered by Xanga (Momaroo, Revelife, Datingish or Hoodstars).

For step-by-step instructions and specifications for your Plug, check out the Help Wiki at http://info.xanga.com/wiki/Plugz

To get started, visit http://www.xanga.com/private/plugz/createplug.aspx.

How much do Plugz cost?  When will my Plug go live on Xanga?

Pricing is as follows:

Keep in mind that these are strictly introductory prices and are subject to change after two weeks! Take advantage of this price now – being on Private Home is a big deal and the cost will go up

Plugz need to be approved by Xanga administrators –  their content should be appropriate for our community! – and will take up to 48 hours for approval. After approval, your Plugz will be displayed with other approved Plugz on Xanga. Plugz are shown on Private Home, Feedback and Subscriptions pages.

What’s in it for me?

“It’s a global recommend,” as a beta tester said. This is a great way for you to get recognition from the entire Xanga community. You may find sites you’ve never come across before, publicize your own site and meet new friends.

You can check out the increased traffic to your site in your Feedback Log  – you’ll see hits from the three pages mentioned above. You can also see the number of times your Plug has been both clicked on and displayed  on the Plug details page by going to http://www.xanga.com/private/plugz/plugzmanager.aspx and clicking on the Plug you want.
 
I don’t want to see Plugz on my pages. How can I turn them off?

As a default, Premium users will have Plugz turned off. However, if they wish to turn them on, they can do so by going to http://www.xanga.com/private/plugz/plugzsetup.aspx

There was a site created that – if you visited it – would send a mass message to your subs and friends with the Subject: "Who Owns this Xanga?". That's all that it did; it doesn't appear to have affected sites in any other way.

We shut it down before it could have much impact. Around 6k Xangans got the message (that's the number of people who got the message, not the number of people who clicked over to the site).

How did it work? The site took advantage of a security hole in Flash. We're working to change things so that Flash's security hole can't impact any Xanga systems.

Please note: it appears that all this exploit could do is send a mass message from your account. We're digging deeper to see if it could do anything else, but we're pretty sure it didn't. Just to be on the safe side, if you visited that site... you might want to change your password. If you didn't visit that site or didn't send a mass message yourself, you have nothing to worry about.

Dan has been working hard all afternoon to shut down this expolit. Thanks to the many users who sent us a heads up!

We've gotten some feedback lately that we should feature more updates on the Xanga frontpage... and re-focus Xanga on its roots as a blogging community (good points, Dan!). RaVnR even created this cool logo for us:

It was kinda kismet to read it - that's actually exactly the direction we're moving in! We've been mocking up some changes to the frontpage, and would love your feedback on some of the potential changes we're considering:

1. TURNING THE XANGA FRONTPAGE INTO A BLOG Continue reading →

Now you can actually earn pennies for your thoughts.

Starting today, premium users will have the option to put their own Google AdSense ads on their Xanga sites.

Just like you see your footprints add up each day when you're active on the site, you'll have the chance to see your profits add up, too. You can control the number of ads you'd like to
display as well as the size and placement of those advertisements.

We'll
set you up with our AdSense wizard; Google will send you an email to
verify your information and you'll be up and running - it's that easy.

Your Xangaing can subsidize your coffee, Red Bull or whatever gets you ready to blog - now that's sweet.

So you may be getting some serious traffic from Xangans, but it's about time you let the world know about your amazing Xanga site, right?

Check out the new ShareThis button - located next to your recommends and stars - for an easy way to share Xanga posts on sites like Digg, Technorati, Facebook and StumbleUpon . . . or even on Xanga itself!

Now you've got an easy way to let everyone on the interwebs know about a friend's - or maybe your own! - Xanga site.

If you'd rather not share your content on other sites, click here for instructions on how you can opt out.

Happy sharing!

We got some great feedback on View Counts, so we made a few changes right away:

• Views on your own site no longer get counted - Some of you pointed out that it's weird for your own views to count.  Good point - now if you're signed in and looking at your own weblog entries, those hits will no longer count toward your total views.

• Ability to hide the view counts - if the new view counts aren't your thing, you can actually hide them pretty easily. Here's how to hide them:

XANGA THEMES

If you're using the new Xanga Themes system, here are the steps to hide your view counts:

1) Sign in, click "edit theme" and then click the "Remix Theme" option:

2) click the "css" option...

and paste in the following "Custom CSS":

3) click "save" and your view counts should disappear!

XANGA "LOOK & FEEL"

If you're using the xanga "look & feel" system, just sign in, click to edit your look & feel, and paste the following code into your "Custom Header" area:

That should do it - your view counts should now be hidden.  Hope that helps!

Now you can see how many views you get on each of your new weblog entries!

We've had this feature in place for photos & videos for years, but it turned out to be a much bigger technical challenge for weblog entries. Now, thanks to justin, we're finally able to show view counts for each of your new weblog entries .

Some notes about your older weblog entries:

• All my posts say "1 view" - what's up? - It's possible the view counter hasn't had a chance to get to your post yet. It's working its way backward through the roughly bajillion weblog entries that have been posted since the last millennium (ok it's just 1999). And as you can imagine, this process will take some time.

• Some of my older posts have more comments than views, how is that possible? - It's not!  We only started collecting view data for weblogs recently.  To be specific: we started collecting Views for unthemed weblog entries at the end of last year, and started collecting Views for themed weblog entries last week. So the Views you see on each post is really the total views since around the start of 2008 (for unthemed weblog entries) or last week (for themed weblog entries).

For all your new posts - and any posts from earlier this year - the view counts should be pretty accurate.

What views get counted? - We only count views on the actual post itself (i.e. the comment page for that post). So if someone goes to xanga.com/thexangateam and reads the post there... that first post won't get a view. But if they click in to read it, it definitely will!

View counts have been popular for photo and video pages, so we're excited to finally bring Views to weblogs too.   Have fun watching those Views grow!

We get a bunch of emails asking about the original sources of footprints. Googlebots are often displayed as visitors from California, and it can be hard to differentiate whether a robot or a Pacific Ocean bodyboarder is visiting your Xanga site.

Thanks to Chris and Justin, you'll get more detailed explanations about visitors who aren't signed into Xanga accounts. Check out your footprints page and you'll get a better idea of who those anonymous visitors are, including browser info (where available) and if it's a search bot or an actual person.

Hope this helps dispel any conspiracy theories about who's been reading your site!