Hey guys - you've probably noticed that the site has been intermittently slow and inaccessible today.

We switched network providers last night... but when traffic picked up, the bandwidth started to choke.  Our network provider ended up having the wrong equipment on hand to fix it, and we're waiting for the correct equipment to be delivered today.

Sorry for this - hopefully the new network providers will be online soon and the site will be faster than ever!

In the meantime - my humblest apologies for this...

John

We will be performing upgrades to Xanga's network on May 31st.

The site will be intermittently inaccessible starting around 11:30PM EST for between 10 to 30 minutes depending on your location.

Thanks!

1. Personal Search and Customizable Private Pages are almost here!

Marc and Justin have been hard at work, and the new customizable private pages with personal search are almost ready!

We're hoping to make it available on a beta basis in the next week or two.  Let us know if you're interested in participating!  We've been using it in house, and it's getting raves, although admittedly from a biased crew.  

Hopefully you guys love it as much as we do! Continue reading →

We just rolled a few tweaks to the top toolbar:

 

• Expanded "Update" Menu - we've replaced the old "blog now!" menu (which had options only for adding weblogs, photos and pulses) with a *full menu* of update options *including* new "edit" links to give you easy access to your various manager pages (e.g. photo manager)
• Prominent "Help" Link - we've added a prominent link to our help forums, so you can easily get answers to pressing questions like, "When is Xanga going to launch the customizable private pages?!" (A: soon! This toolbar update is actually part of that project.)
• A Bit Better Organized - in the old toolbar, the menu of links under your username had a strange mix of private and public pages; in this updated toolbar, the menus under each link are organized as follows:
  • under your username - links to your private pages (plus your current credit count, which is basically a private piece of info)
  • under "view site" - links to your public pages
  • under "update" - full menu of update & edit links

Also, if you're using Xanga Themes, you'll see that the "edit theme" link now appears on *all* of your public pages so it should be much easier to find!

Just another quick update as we continue our Xanga spring cleaning...

Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

We've just rolled some minor updates to the frontpage to try to optimize a few things.

 

 

In case you're having trouble spotting the specific changes, here's what's new:

• Showing Longer Titles in the 4-Picture Module - a lot of you pointed out that titles were regularly getting cut off in that module, so we've made the text smaller and moved from just two lines of text to three lines of text for each title. Now you should be able to see the full title for almost all the posts.
• Moving Top Blogs a Little Higher on the Page - as you can see from the before & after screenshots, the Top Blogs module ends up a little higher on the page after these latest tweaks

But wait, you say... how can you add longer titles without pushing top blogs *down*? Well, we started by hiding those little labels that used to show above the pictures (Parenting, Dating, Beauty, etc.). But because some of you mentioned that you liked those labels, we've used some CSS trickery to make them available - just mouse over any of the pictures and you'll see the label!

Just keepin' y'all in the loop.

 

As we continue to work on the new customized private home page, we're taking the time to clean up some related features and pages that could really use a little TLC. First up: Footprints.

Over the last week or so, we've rolled a bunch of fixes and updates for Footprints:

• Better Bot Filtering - we've updated our filtering system so you should see far fewer footprints from random bots
• Cleaner "Page Visited" - most of the links in your "Page Visited" column should now have an easy-to-read format like, "Weblog: Cleaning up... Footprints!" (or whatever the actual title of your post was)
• Shorter "Referrer" URLS - we trimmed some extraneous data off the links in the "Referrer" column so you should be able to see more useful info about the links that are sending folks to your site

To see these updates in action, just visit your Footprints page.

Happy Friday Everyone!

 

The cleaned-up frontpage we posted about yesterday is live!

To recap, here are the updates:

1. Enhanced Top Blogs - we've updated the Top Blogs algorithm to take more criteria into account (so it updates more frequently, is a bit more robust against manipulation and - we hope - does a better job identifying interesting/fun/cool content)
2. More Traffic to Xangans - we've swapped Featured Weblogs and Top Blogs to try to drive more traffic to everyone's blogs
3. General Clean Up - we've tweaked the design here and there just to make it feel cleaner overall.

Now that the new page is live, what do you guys think?

Marc

We're finishing up Personal Search and the new customized private home page...  part of our Spring Cleaning initiative.

As part of that effort, we took a quick pass at cleaning up the frontpage!  We took into account a lot of the feedback we've gotten on the ideas tab and elsewhere:

Just to highlight the the tweaks we're considering here:

1. Enhancing Top Blogs to take more criteria into account (so it updates more frequently and is a bit more robust against manipulation).
2. Swapping Featured Weblogs and Top Blogs, to drive more traffic to everyone's blogs.
3. Cleaning up and tweaking the page, to make it look more fancier (click on the screenshot above for a closer look).

Before we make any changes though, we wanted to hear from you guys.  What do you guys think?

John

As promised, we've been working on adding a search box to the private page...  you can see it in the upper left side of this preview screenshot:

While we were at it, we realized something kinda neat.  We could offer a theme-like system that lets you customize your private page.  You could easily add a header image, change the main colors, and tweak the links too - like in the following screenshot:

Or thousands of other looks!

These private pages are a little too complicated to work with full Xanga Themes or "Look & feel" settings (though we're working on this one). But with these new, simple customization options - add a custom header, change trim & link colors, etc. - we hope you'll be able to make your private pages feel like home.

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While we were adding the search box and looking into customizable private pages, we also considered tweaking the navigation a bit to make it easier to find key pages: your subs page, messages page, and private page.  Also, we took out some of the images above the posting buttons - just to make the page seem a bit less cluttered.

You can see those tweaks in the screenshot... what do you think?

Now you can search within specific blogs on Xanga!

I just used it to find a reaaaaally old post from my own site - these were serious times