For the first post in our series of conversations, we wanted to give an update on Xanga's mobile efforts.

We're working on three separate projects to better support iPhones, Androids and other smartphones.

1. Mobile browsing

Earlier this year, we launched a mobile browsing interface at m.xanga.com. It's streamlined to allow for quick and seamless browsing, all from your universal inbox.

It's been great to use to browse the site, but not so great for posting: mobile browsers don't usually let you access the smartphone camera, for example. To get photos off your smartphone, you need a full-fledged app. Which brings us to project #2:

2. Mobile App posting

I was recently hanging out with my son Charlie at the playground, and took this snapshot with my iPhone:

Obviously it'd be great if I could post directly to the frontpage of my Xanga site from my iPhone! We've been working on enabling that, and are really close... but we quickly realized that if I posted a photo directly to my Xanga site, nobody would even see it because it's not on my site frontpage. Which brings us to mobile project #3.  Continue reading →

We mentioned last week that we'll be hosting a conversation on TheXangaTeam blog about different aspects of Xanga.

We would also like to have another set of conversations with you guys, this one over the phone and a bit more private. So we're inviting interested Xangans to apply for a 12-person Xanga Product Council that we'll be announcing later this month.

What's involved?

• You agree to hop on the phone with us once or twice over the next month.
• We'll interview you about specific Xanga features, and get your feedback on what you like and what you'd don't.
• Then we'll end with a free form chat where you can tell us the one site improvement you'd most like to see on the site!
• Bonus points if you have Skype installed, and know how to do a screenshare.

We'll be selecting both Classic and Premium members for the Xanga Product Council. This first ever Council will be in session for one month. We'll be forming more councils over time, so if you don't get in on this one then there's always next time.

Interested? Just comment on this post within the next few days, and let us know why you should be on the council!

It's been a while since we gave an update on what we're up to here at Xanga HQ.

We've been hard at work lately, to better support our amazing community. Here are some of the highlights:

• FOCUS ON BLOGGING: We're working to simplify and streamline Xanga: both to clean up the interface, and also to focus the Xanga experience on its strength: blogging
• INTEGRATION: There are a lot of great features on Xanga that don't get used very much. For example, if you post a photo... it doesn't appear on your Xanga Site unless you post it in a weblog, or a reader happens to click on the photo tab. We're working to change that
• STRONGER MOBILE SUPPORT: This work will also enable us to add stronger mobile support. We've made a lot of progress with our mobile beta, and are excited to cross the finish line with mobile apps.

As we get the basics in play, we are looking to get your feedback on what you'd like to see. Along those lines, for the rest of this month we'll be hosting a conversation on TheXangaTeam blog about different aspects of Xanga. We'll be posting on different topics, both sharing our thoughts and collecting your feedback.

On a personal note, I will always be grateful to Xanga. I met my wife on the site, and we've had two kids together (neither named Xanga, alas). Oh yah, I forgot to mention... last night, Mrs. Xanga gave birth to our second kid: a baby girl.

Xanga has been a wonderful force for good in the lives of many of us at Xanga HQ. We'd like to return the favor by making the site better than ever. The Xanga team has been putting our heads together, and we're getting increasingly excited about the future. We're looking forward to talking to many of you over the next month, and working together to make this community great!

@john

We just launched the updated hash-tagging system we wrote about earlier.

Now you can just add a "#" symbol in front of any word in your post, and we'll automatically convert it into a linked tag. A few notes about this new system:

• works in weblog posts and pulses
• works in weblog titles too - it won't link to the tag page inside the title (because the whole title is already linked to the comments page for the post), but it will tag your post
• works with multi-word-tags - just put dashes between each word in your tag (e.g. #harry-potter), and it'll get treated as a multi-word-tag 
• does *not* taggify things that start with numbers (#1, #2, etc.) or other special characters (#!@%) - a lot of folks use numbering in their posts, and some of us use things like "#!@%" in lieu of certain other words. These things are not typically intended as tags, so this new system will not taggify them automatically. But if you really want to create these tags, you can always use the old "Tags" field in your editor, which still works.

Thanks again to @justin for programming this one!

Let us know what you think.

Marc

We just launched the updated user-tagging system we wrote about earlier this week.

Now you can just add an "@" symbol in front of any username, and we'll automatically convert it into a linked user tag (pointing to that user's site). A few notes about this new system:

• works in weblog posts and pulses
• works in weblog titles too - it won't link to the username inside the title (because the whole title is already linked to the comments page for the post), but it'll alert the username who you tagged
• works with "private drafts" - a lot of folks use the "private" status on weblog entries as a "draft" status while they are actively working on the post... username tags will *not* trigger alerts to those usernames while any post remains private. But the first time you make the post public (i.e. when you finally make your "draft" live) the alerts will then get sent
• some trickiness with future posts - in future posts, any username tags *will* get automatically linked when the post finally gets published, but alerts will not get sent... We didn't want to send alerts when you first teed up the post because the recipient wouldn't be able to read the post (it isn't published yet!). But it turns out it'd take a pretty big overhaul of our future posting system to trigger alerts when the posts finally do get published... Just an FYI - we're still looking into this one.

If you're not keen on getting alerted when people tag you, you can turn off or limit your alerts here:

http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountsettings.aspx

Thanks to @justin for programming this one!

Let us know what you think.

Marc

We've long had a tagging feature for weblog entries, but most Xangans (including me) have never really used it regularly.

Because the new Related Posts module depends on tags - and because there are lots of other cool things we can do with tags - we asked a bunch of you why you weren't tagging more often. And we got two pretty consistent answers:

1. it's kind of a pain
2. people don't seem to click on the tags anyway.

To address both of these issues, we're updating the tagging feature - for both keyword tags and user tags - so that you can easily add tags on-the-fly, right inside your posts!

• Keyword Tagging - just add a pound sign (#) in front of any word in your post, and we'll automatically convert it into a linked keyword tag (pointing to your other posts that might share that tag)
• User Tagging - just add an "@" symbol in front of any username, and we'll automatically convert it into a linked user tag (pointing to that user's site)

I'm particularly excited about this new approach to user tagging because it always felt odd to have to check off a separate list of, "People mentioned in this post," rather than just mentioning them straight in the post itself. Also I'm hoping this new approach will help curb some of the quasi-spammy use of this feature just to get user-tagged people to visit your post. But either way, remember that you can always turn off email updates about user tags:

http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountsettings.aspx

And we're going to provide a way to turn off universal inbox updates about user tags as well.

We'll let you know when this feature launches!

@Marc

P.S. Just a heads up for the very small number of you who currently use the old user tagging system: it's going to disappear from your editor soon - probably sometime today. We'll be replacing it with this updated system, which we hope to launch shortly!

We just launched the "Related Posts" module for everyone!

We've been developing and testing this feature for a while on our own sites, and on some sites we've gotten it to the point where this one module drives over 10% of overall pageviews!

The technology behind this module is pretty straightforward, but it helps to understand how it works so that you can get the most out of it...

The "Related Posts" module uses two key inputs:

1. Tags - the module uses tags to determine whether posts are related. If the module can't find any related posts based on tags, it simply shows a few of your recent posts.

   On our sites, we've found that any post appearing in this module does get more clicks. But the posts that are truly related - based on tags - get a lot more clicks. So, if you haven't been tagging your posts, now is the time to get started! You don't have to think too hard about your tagging; just one or a few tags per post should be enough.

2. Pictures* - people are more likely to click on pictures than text...

   The "Related Posts" module takes advantage of this behavior by automatically grabbing a sample picture from each post to use in the module. Specifically, it grabs the first image inside each post (excluding non-content images like Xanga smileys) and turns it into a little thumbnail image inside the module. If your post has no images, it uses your profile picture. Even just the profile picture helps drive clicks, but a nice, unique image works much better.

   So if you already use images in your posts, start putting your catchiest ones first. If you don't use images, you might want to consider adding at least one nice image to each post... or at the very least make sure you have a good profile pic!

   *NOTE: the "Related Posts" module uses only Xanga-hosted images for now, but we're looking to add support for outside images too (in case you use other photo-hosting services) - we'll keep you posted on this one!

For those who don't want this new module, you'll find instructions for hiding it here:

http://help.xanga.com/topic/how-do-i-hide-the-related-posts-module

Hope this helps everyone find more great posts!

Let us know what you think.

Marc

We recently launched new sign-in options to help Xangans get more comments. Now we're working on a feature that should help Xangans get more pageviews: Related Posts.

We've actually been developing and testing this feature for a while on some of our own sites. We've gotten it to the point where it now drives on average about 5-7% of overall pageviews on those sites. And on some sites, the "Related Posts" module drives over 10% of overall pageviews!

The technology behind the "Related Posts" module is pretty straightforward, but it'll take some tweaking to get it to work across the millions of blogs on Xanga. While we do this tweaking, we just wanted to give you a quick heads up on how to get the most out of this upcoming feature...

The "Related Posts" module uses two key inputs:

1. Tags* - the module uses tags to determine whether posts are related. If the module can't find any related posts based on tags, it simply shows a few of your recent posts.

   On our sites, we've found that any post appearing in this module does get more clicks. But the posts that are truly related - based on tags - get a lot more clicks. So, if you haven't been tagging your posts, now is the time to get started! You don't have to think too hard about your tagging; just one or a few tags per post should be enough.

   *Note: we have been exploring other approaches to finding relatedness - such as searching the text of each post to try to determine keywords automatically. But this simple tag-based approach is working so well that we wanted to get it out to everyone ASAP while we continue exploring other approaches.

2. Pictures - some internet truthiness: people are more likely to click on pictures than text.

   The "Related Posts" module takes advantage of this behavior by automatically grabbing a sample picture from each post to use in the module. Specifically, it grabs the first image inside each post (excluding non-content images like Xanga smileys) and turns it into a little thumbnail image inside the module. If your post has no images, it uses your profile picture. Even just the profile picture helps drive clicks, but a nice, unique image works much better.

   So if you already use images in your posts, start putting your catchiest ones first. If you don't use images, you might want to consider adding at least one nice image to each post... or at the very least make sure you have a good profile pic!

We'll be rolling this new feature to all sites soon. For those who don't want it, we'll be sure to provide some way to hide it from view.

Let us know what you think!

Marc

P.S. two quick updates on other issues:

1. Commenting bug - on our last post, a few folks mentioned a bug that has been eating comments, especially when it looks like yours is going to be the first comment. We found and fixed an issue that might've been causing that bug. Thanks for the bug reports!

2. Profile picture uploading bug - also should be fixed... let us know if you're still having any issues with profile pics - thanks!

During the recent Xanga blogathon I noticed a lot of footprints from friends on other social networks, but none of these friends left any comments. I got emails from them - and even some phone calls - but not one single comment.

It really drove home the point that not everyone is willing to create a Xanga account just to leave a comment. Even our "guest" ("anonymous") comment feature seems to be too much of a hassle for most people to use - except spammers, ugh. 

After digging into the data and asking these friends why they didn't just leave comments, it became clear that making it easier for users of other social networks to sign in for commenting would almost definitely increase comments on Xanga blog posts.

Like many Xangans, I look forward to getting comments on my posts. So even though I personally don't use these other social networks, we built the feature... Now users of Facebook or Twitter can sign in to comment on Xanga sites.

If you're not a fan of these other sites or you just prefer to keep your Xanga site separate from the rest of the world, no worries - please keep the following in mind:

• This feature is automatically disabled on locked sites - if your site is locked (signin lock, footprints lock or friends lock), people need to be signed into *Xanga* to visit it - so by default, all your comments will still come from signed-in Xanga users, only

• Specific Facebook and Twitter users can be blocked - if you get a comment from a Facebook or Twitter user and you don't like it, you can block that user. This provides an additional level of blocking support, above and beyond what you can do with "guest" ("anonymous") commenters.

In general, not much should change for Xanga bloggers, except - we hope - that you will get more comments!

Let us know what you think.

Marc

The site was down for an hour this morning, when some pages caused our CPU to hit 100%.  We're still investigating exactly what happened, but we've made some changes and the site should be ok for now.

We will be redirecting some pages to the signin pages until we're sure that they're not contributing to the CPU issues at hand.  Sorry about the downtime, and thanks for your patience!