Now you can "Like" individual weblog entries so that they get shared through your Facebook feeds!

It's an easy way to show somebody you appreciate their posts and, unlike "recommending", it can help that person get new visitors from beyond the Xanga kingdom.

If you'd rather keep your Xanga moat full of Facebook-hating alligators, though, you can easily disable this new feature. Moreover, as part of this roll we've disabled the "Share" and "Like" buttons on the Meebo toolbar, so now you have even more control over your castle defenses.

Hope you like!

We had a "Share" button on Xanga sites for a few years, so that people could share public posts with their friends on various social media sites. We did some digging into the data though, and found out not many people were using the share buttons.... so we took 'em down a few months ago.

We kept on digging into the data though, and noticed that the Facebook Like button had been driving a growing amount of traffic. So we created a setting which gives you the choice over whether or not to display a Facebook Like button on your posts:

The new feature won't go live til the end of the week or so, but the settings are already live. If you don't want the Like button to show (or if you're like me and just don't like Facebook), just set your setting to "no"... and nothing at all will change. You can find the setting here:

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

Just a heads up: we've gotten a lot of questions over the years asking, "What's a blogring?" So we're going to rename them to be a bit more clear: "groups".

Marc and I were chatting about this earlier, and we remembered that the term was a play on "webring". The Wikipedia entry on webrings kinda nailed that 'rings of all kind are on the decline:

"A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur websites, but have since become quite rare."

In 2003, Gollum even bit off the One Ring and destroyed it within the volcanic fires of Mount Doom. So as you can see, it hasn't been a good decade for 'rings.

In any case, we'll be making the transition very carefully so as to try to not break any scripts people have installed. Just a courtesy heads up, in case you were wondering...

John

Ever come across a comment so good and so profound that you wish you could recommend it to everyone? Or ever write a comment so scintillating that you wish you could share it with all of your friends?

Well, now you can! Today we're announcing two new features:

• Comment Recs: if you see a great comment written by someone else, now you can click to "recommend" it

• Comment Sharing: if you write a great comment (and let's be honest: they're all pretty great, aren't they?), now you can just check the box to "Share this comment" and it'll get published to your feed.

To help us test this new feature, please comment on this post and share it with your Xanga friends. Or you can just scan for the wittiest or metaphysically truthiest comments by other Xangans and click to rec them.

On your mark.. get set... comment!

We just made some tweaks to the the site that should make it load much faster:

1. Now your page content loads first

   For classic users, we used to load the ad code at the start of the page... but we noticed that if the ads were slow, they could sometimes "block" the rest of the page from loading. (If you ever visit a site where the top area loads quickly, but the rest of the page appears only after a long delay, this is probably what's going on... look for an ad right at the spot where the page suddenly seemed to stop loading). With this update we moved all the ad code to the very end of the page, so it doesn't stop your content from loading, even if the ads are slow.

   For allusers, we used to load all kinds of other code near the start of the page too - just stuff needed to make Xanga work in general - but some of that code sometimes had a similar "blocking" effect. We've moved almost all of this code to the end of the page, so again, your content loads first.

    
2. We load images only when you need them

   When you visit a web page, your browser immediately tries to load all the images it finds on the page - even if the images are nowhere near the part of the page that you are viewing. This behavior can really slow down your browsing experience, especially with image-heavy posts.

   With these tweaks, we now load images only when they are in or near the part of the page you are viewing. As you scroll up and down the page, the nearby images will be pre-loaded so that they are there for you to see. It's a pretty neat compromise, and one that can really speed up the site!

   To see why it's faster, check out this before-and-after example of an *actual* post from Xanga's Top Blogs (the images show the cascade of "requests" for images and other stuff that your browser makes when you first visit the page):

Before
11.24MB - 59.63seconds

After
0.06MB - 1.98seconds
^^^
Now your browser does a lot less work, downloads a lot less stuff, and loads the page much more quickly!

In general, this particular update should make your browsing on Xanga about 10x faster than before... and if a site has a lot of pictures, maybe 20-30x faster.

The result of these tweaks is that Xanga sites should feel "snappier" as you click around the the site.

Let us know if you can notice a difference!

We just made the Xanga Mobile Beta open to everyone!

To test it out, just visit the following URL on your mobile phone (you can also try it in safari, chrome or firefox on your pc or mac):

http://m.xanga.com

For a quick overview of the initial launch (on Feb 23), check out the initial launch post.

Our goal in this "Beta 0.x" phase is to get all the initial specs working well on as many mobile devices as possible. Then we'll move onto "Beta 1.x" where we'll start adding more features (see below)

Here's what we've updated/fixed since that initial launch of Beta 0.x:

• Added view counts on the comment pages for each post
• Made the left/right touch-swipe on comments work more smoothly (FYI: as in many apps, this motion will trigger an edit or delete button on comments for which you have edit/delete control - you can also click into any individual comment to see this button)
• Fixed an issue preventing vertical touch-scrolling over long comments
• Fixed an issue causing most flash videos to appear on top of the top and bottom toolbars (this issue may still happen from time to time, but we got most of the flash under control)
• Fixed a UI issue with the inbox filter menu in landscape mode
• Fixed a few minor bugs with the weblog editor
• Added a "Hint" for iphone/ipad users to explain how to scroll inside a text area (when editing long comments or weblog entries) - turns out the trick is to scroll with two fingers instead of one (who knew?!)

Here are some known issues remaining to be fixed in Beta 0.x (please leave a comment if you spot any other issues!):

• If you initiate a vertical touch-scroll when your finger is on an image or flash object, the top and bottom toolbars lose their position
• View counts are not incrementing correctly when you visit someone's post inside of Xanga Mobile
• Timestamps sometimes fall out of sync (if your phone's time conflicts with the time on the Xanga Mobile servers), causing all the timestamps in your inbox to appear as, "a couple seconds ago"

Here's what we're planning to add for Beta 1.x:

• Ability to add photos - Note: this one may require us to convert this web-based version of Xanga Mobile into an app first, which we are planning to do anyway...
• Incorporating more updates into the inbox (e.g. pulse updates, pulse comments, etc.)
• Ability to trigger a feed update by touch-dragging down (inbox) or up (comments) on the screen (FYI - the inbox updates itself periodically at the moment, but this feature will let you trigger an update whenever you want without having to refresh the entire page)
• Ability to "Follow" (subscribe or friend) or "Unfollow" people inside the mobile interface
• Ability to click and see "all" updates (all public weblog entries, for starters) from a specific user (right now the interface is feed-based, so you see the entries that pop into your feed, but you can't currently click to see more entries by a specific user)
• [Potentially] localization of the interface for non-english speakers (for at least one or two additional languages, e.g. chinese)

A quick word about mobile browser support:

Xanga Mobile is built on the relatively new, but quickly evolving jQuery Mobile platform. We chose it because it already supports a good number of the major mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, and the newer versions of Blackberry OS and Windows Mobile) and because jQuery has an active group of developers (i.e. you can expect support for additional mobile operating systems over time). You can find the full list of current mobile browser support here:

Mobile Browser Support for jQuery Mobile

Please bear in mind that Xanga Mobile is still in beta - still very much in the testing phase - so please try it out and help us test it!

http://m.xanga.com

Thanks!

Marc

We just launched a beta version of Xanga Mobile!

To test it out, just visit the following URL on your mobile phone (you can also try it in safari, chrome or firefox on your pc or mac):

http://m.xanga.com

Please note: you must have premium to use it at the moment. But we definitely plan to make it available to everyone soon!

We really focused on simplicity with Xanga Mobile. To keep this first version as simple as possible, we focused on our good ol' friend, the weblog.

Continue reading →

We've been upgrading many of our servers to brand new shiny equipment. 

Overall it's been going well, but recently our new database server has been hitting some snags.  It's resulted in some recent site downtime (ugh) and also, the photo uploader has been on the blink.  Sorry about that!

We're tuning the database on a daily basis to address these issues!  Hopefully they will be resolved soon - we'll keep you posted.

We're trying an experiment for the next week: we're temporarily replacing the Featured Content with four Plugz.

(haha, special thanks to litlkittykat and falconsdrummer for making xanga look so suspect in this screenshot)

Why?  Well I picked featured weblogs for a long time, and kept on hearing people say, "You're picking the wrong posts!"  After a while, we got to thinking: maybe we should turn this over to the community.  So we swapped out Featured Weblogs (in the center of the front page) with Top Blogs, which is community generated.

That's been pretty popular and resulted in more clicks for the Xanga community.  So we got to wondering: should we try a "Featured Xangans" module that uses Plugz instead of human editors?  After all, anyone can plug a post or site for any other Xanga member.  So if you like someone's post or site, you can submit a Plug for it using the credits you earn for using Xanga.  Or you can also highlight your own content as well.

So we thought we'd try it out for a week.  You can submit a Plug here:

• http://www.xanga.com/private/plugz/createplug.aspx

You can earn credits for Plugz as you use the site.  Almost nobody ever buys Plugz, but if you wanted to, it starts at fifty cents worth of credits a day.  So try it out and if your Plug goes live, there's a good chance it will appear on our frontpage!

Please keep in mind that this is just an experiment.  We haven't been able to update Featured Weblogs recently, so this will use that space a bit better in the meantime. 

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

John

Your subscriptions page gives you an easy way to read the latest updates from all your subs, but it has a few drawbacks: 1) it may not show the full text of the updates (because of cut tags), 2) it may not show images (because your sub disables them), and 3) it doesn't let you read or leave comments.

To deal with any of these drawbacks, you'd normally have to leave your subs page... But starting today, with Xanga's new "Quick Browse" feature, you can take your subs page with you!

To use the new feature, just click the "Quick Browse" link on your subs page or the new "Quick Browse" button in the chat bar. If you click the link on your subs page, it'll take you straight to the first entry itself, where you can see its full text, any images it might include, and be able to read and write comments. It will also give a deserved "view" to your subscription (whose view count does not increase when you read the entry from your subs page).

When you're ready to move on to another entry, just click "Next" inside the Quick Browse window (or if you're feeling adventurous, try clicking "Random").

The Quick Browse feature also helps you browse through Today's Top Blogs, Today's Most Rec'd and even the Latest Updates from all of Xanga (now with much less spam).

So get clicking and, as always, please let us know what you think!