Thanks for all your great feedback on the Recommend feature .  We made a list last week of the recommend features you guys asked for... and Justin and Ayca just added them to the site!

• If lots of your subs recommend the same post, they'll all be grouped together in your Universal Inbox nicely
• We added a "recs" tab to the Inbox to display only recommended posts

The best part of recommend is that it's a great way to find new blogs to subscribe to.    Sometimes it does get a bit overwhelming though, so it's nice to have a tab where you can go just to see rec's.

To check out how the feature works, please recommend this post using the heart icon below!  Other people will recommend it too, and then you can see how the grouping and the new recommends tab works here:

• http://www.xanga.com/private/homemain.aspx

It's Thursday again and this week we're highlighting a few themes that are among today's most previewed themes. Click on the theme to see more themes by the same artist.

    

    

    

    

If you'd like us to feature one of your favorite themes or designers please leave us a comment and we'll check them out for next week's Themes Thursday post.

Thanks to everyone that came out and chatted with us this morning! Next week the Office Hours chats will return to their regular times: Tuesday 10-11a.m. and Thursday 5-6p.m. EST. Hope to see you there!

Due to popular demand (and lots to talk about), we're doing previously unscheduled Office Hours chats tonight 5-6 p.m. EST and tomorrow morning, 10-11 a.m.

Come chat! We'll be here.

We've received some more cool post cards from users all around the world! Here are a few check out the rest in our postcard album

monkie_361 who went on holiday to London

be_the_rain from Texas

gurkhason from Singapore

Arianna from Bloomington, Indiana

indigolady in Frankfurt, Germany

SuSu from Alaska

saintvi in Baroda ("The Duh"), Michigan

Thanks to all the users that sent in post cards! We have enough to start making fun designs on the bare wall of our office.

We just launched our Recommend feature today!

It's really a simple feature: if you like a post, just click the Recommend link.  Your subs and friends will see a link to that post in their Inbox!  It's a great way to share great content... and pretty convenient if you're lazy like me .

It's only been a few hours since we launched Recommend, but already we've gotten hundreds of recommendations in the system!  We've been learning a lot from how people are using it:

• It can be a bit overwhelming to get tons of recommendations all at once
• It can be a bit annoying if lots of people recommend the same post.  So we may find ways to group those together (e.g. "This post has been recommended by three subs").
• Some people have mentioned it'd be nice to have a recommendations
  tab/filter on your Universal Inbox, so you can view only
  recommendations if you want.

We'll get to work on those!  In the meantime, I'm surprised at how many great posts I have come across that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.  I've already subbed to a bunch of new sites tonight, and am looking forward to finding may more.  Many thanks to Patrick, Ayca, and Justin for all their hard work!

John

Tagging themes not only helped us to organize all the themes for our users but also shed some light on the awesome talented designers that create themes! One of the newest themes designers that caught our eye is TANGENA.

Here is a sampling of her awesome designs:
   

 

Check out more here

X: How long have you been a Xanga user and how did you find xanga?

This is actually my second username which I have made on 8/30/2003. The first one that I made was some time during the winter of 2002. It is still there; however my mind isn’t able to recall the password. Iwas in high school back then and my curiosity with the internet escorted me to Xanga.

X: Do you have a design background or any previous experience in making layouts?

Actually, designing layouts all started from a website that I haven’t used in years, and probably won’t use it any time soon. While my friends started noticing my layouts, they told me of a program called Adobe Photoshop. I have never taken a class nor was I able to afford one back then; so I played around with the program to see what it is made of. I would have to guess that the first time I started designing layouts was in the year 2002.

X: How do you come up with your themes? What’s your inspiration?

Ever since grade school, the subject that I really had fun with was art and it came out naturally. I still have the same imagination from then, and what induces it even more is not an object, but a caring person; my boyfriend. We have been together for more than five years and he has been my inspiration and motivation until now.

X: What’s your favorite theme, out of the ones you made so far?

It is rather difficult to tell which one is my favorite. One day I may like one that takes a clean appearance, and another day I may like something wild and vivid.

X: What do you like most about themes?

To tell you the truth, there are two reasons why I came back to Xanga: 1) I miss it, and 2) because of the development of Themes!! This feature is a wonderful way to showcase and highlight your creativeness. It is chance for you to extract your abilities and perhaps inspire other users to do the same, but in their own way, as well. Plus I like the fact that hovering over the many different colors in the color palette will automatically show in the layout you are arranging. You can figure out what colors you want before you click on one.

X: What do you like most about xanga?

I like how Xanga functions in the same way as a community. It consists of opinions, differences, relationships, knowledge, and guidance. It is a place where you can make friends from a rather far distance as well as keeping in touch with friends you have lost. Also Xanga is quite organized making it easier to use.

X: What do you like to do in your spare time- hobbies? interests?

In my spare time, which I seldom have, I love to play the piano, watch Spongebob Squarepants (it has a lot of adult humor), take pictures, and dance. I taught myself how to break dance at a very young age and it has been on and off since then. Roughly for seven years now, I have been choreographing hip hop and Filipino cultural dances. It is something I really love to do for the enjoyment and for the experience, especially with friends.

Thanks so much TANGENA for being our featured designer of the week! Keep the awesome themes coming!

Also, come out and hang with us during our Office Hours show today 5-6p.m. EST.

Remember how we mentioned we're fixing up little things on Xanga?

One of the little things has been Archives.  We've always had a little weblog calendar you can use to find old posts.  Problem is, each month/date/year is a separate pulldown... so it's never been a beloved feature.

So to fix that, Ben and Mikey added a link to a brand new Weblog Archives page.  You can see what I mean here:

• Overall Archives: http://weblog.xanga.com/TheXangaTeam/archives 
• March Archives: http://weblog.xanga.com/TheXangaTeam/archives/2008/3

There are links to it from any weblog calendar module now... so it should just be one click away.  The coolest part of the features is that you can see what months you posted the most in!  You can really see how we've been posting a lot more to TheXangaTeam blog since Natalia started last year .

Let us know what you think!

Xanga
is settling down a bit .  As we
mentioned recently, we're focused on fixing the site up.  One of things we've been focusing on lately is
Stars.  We got reports that some Xangans
were gaming stars by starring up their posts and then turning off stars
entirely on their site.  Then nobody
could de-star them from being have 5-star posts!   Anyway we fixed that up, so that now if your
posts can't be starred... your posts don't appear on the Most Starred page .

There's
another problem with Stars though: not enough people are using them.  We asked a lot of users why they don't use
stars and the simple answer was: "There's no real incentive for me to
star."  We may add an incentive to
star later, but it got us thinking about how we might incent people to tell us
which posts they love.

That's
when we came up the idea for a Recommend feature.  When you see a post you love, you can
recommend it to your readers.  Then your
subscribers will see a little note that you recommend a particular post.  It's a nice way that you can share your
favorite posts with others.  And on the
subject of bubbling up the best content, maybe the most recommended content
will be interesting as well?

We
bounced the idea off of a bunch of you through user testing (and in our
twice-a-week Xanga TV chats)... and I gotta say, the reaction has been really
positive.  (We actually killed some other
ideas that didn't get as good a reaction, in order to focus on this one).

Still, we don't want to force features on you
guys.  So we are not launching Recommend for a few days, and we built an optout ahead of launching it. Feel free to
turn off the feature before we go live with it:

• http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountprivacy.aspx

Let us know what you
think of the idea for Recommend!

Check out all the cool new themes out in the directory!

Here are a few that caught our eye:

   
 
   

We tagged 1,000 more themes for the search directory two nights ago and continue to add more every day. Major props to naeby for giving us a hand with our most recent additions!

See you at Office Hours tonight - 5 p.m. EST! Be there!

Wanted to share a few updates:

• Some of you pointed out that the subs module on the Subs page was only showing 10 subscriptions at a time.  We dug into it, and fixed it this morning!
• Online Status is live on the site.  I was somewhat skeptical about this one, and we only did it because so many people had asked for it and it was so easy to do.  But I've found it surprisingly nifty!  How about you guys?
• We're getting more and more tagged themes from you guys and we're importing them into the Themes Directory tonight.  I personally love the themes tagged "simple", and can't wait to see more of them.
• The new themed photo pages are going over great, and lots of you are using it to send replies .  Next up: adding replies to video pages!

That's it for now.  Just wanted to give a quick update.  The site is settling down, and we're basically going through and working on consistency and making the site easier to use... and also make it easier to find good content. 

I want to take this chance to thank you guys for all the feedback you've been giving us over the last few months.  We've made a huge effort to blog on this site almost every day, to broadcast twice a week, and to "reply" to as many comments and questions as we can.  Most of all, we've set our priorities based largely on what you guys have been asking for.

Hopefully you can feel the love?  Please let us know how we are doing...

- John