If you're using Xanga Themes and you'd like to display a month-by-month list of your weblog archives (instead of that little calendar), now you can!

Just click to edit your theme. Then click the little edit (pencil) icon on your Weblog Archives module and choose the new "list (by month)" option:

You can set it to show a different number of months by moving the little "number" slider. A couple notes here:

• Older months that are not displayed in your module can always be accessed by clicking the little "view all..." link at the bottom of the module
• Just an FYI - if it shows fewer months than you've actually selected, it's probably because you didn't post anything in some of those months - it automatically excludes months that have no posts.

And then your module will look like this :

And now, back to working on personal search...

Have a great weekend everyone!

Marc

We've gotten great feedback on the new and improved site search... so wanted to share what we're working on next: personal search!

Nini1981 described exactly what we had in mind in a comment on our last post: "Any way to search a [specific] blog.. if not, any plans to make it possible?"

Yup, we plan on making this possible!

A quick preview of our plans:

1) We'll add search boxes to your private pages for easy access to search
2) You'll be able to allow users to search your site, through an optional search bar.
3) Every user will be able to search their site (or at least, the last two years worth of public posts)
4) We'll make sure that Premium users have a full index (from the time you joined) available for both public and private posts (of course, only you will have access to the search results linking to private posts... and search results will be themed).

Anyway that's one of the big projects we're working on now... it's still in progress, as our software needs to finish building the search index.  But we wanted to give a peek at what coming up.

Let us know what you think!

John

We've upgraded our search engine to support real time results and remove spammy posts!

Over the last couple months, an intrepid team of Xanga engineers (led by justin, with help from dan and jon) has completely revamped the search feature ... we've been testing it for a while, and so now we're announcing a new and improved Xanga search:

What's new and improved about it?

Faster - it used to take a whole day for new posts or edits to show up in search results - now it takes just minutes
Much Less Spam- search used to be riddled with posts from spammy accounts - now you should see almost no spam
Trending (beta) - we've also added a list of topics that Xangans have been blogging about a lot lately. We're still working on this one, but we thought we'd add it to search results as a beta feature just so you could all check it out.

We've got some more search updates on the way, but in the meantime please try out the new search and let us know what you think:

http://search.xanga.com/searchsite.aspx?q=olympics

Thanks!
Marc

The site was briefly down early this morning, due to a Domain Name System outage.  We've been maxing out our connection between Xanga's network facility and our network provider - and due to technical reasons, when our connection gets maxed out... that causes DNS issues.

We were up early this morning and were able to resolve the issue quickly.  We've increased the size of our connection and also taken other technical measures to make sure we get alerts and that any DNS outages get resolved quickly.

We'll keep you posted on this!  Just wanted to explain what happened this morning, in case any of you guys were up around 8 am EST...

Personal URLs are back on Xanga!  Personal URLs let you change your site address from the standard username.xanga.com to a totally custom address like yourname.com! (A "URL" - also called a "domain" or "domain name" - is just a fancy word for a site address.) 

And if you want to see a Personal URL in action, please swing by my site and say hola! 

http://www.scienceandinquiry.com

(Yes, I'm a science geek; I'm hoping the new URL will inspire me actually to write more about that stuff.)

URLs are one of those features that are important to be competitive in the market... we've been meaning to add it back for a while, but we had to finish some backend work to prep for it first.  We actually had this feature a looooooooong time ago (about 9 years ago!! ), but we ended up taking it down because the technology wasn't there to let us offer two big features people kept asking about:

1) Personal Email Addresses - Back in the day, we could support only email forwarding... but since then, Gmail has come out!  So we've been able to work with Google Apps (Gmail) to give you fully functioning email addresses attached to your Personal URL - you can set up custom email addresses like "contact@myurl.com" or "woohoo@myurl.com" & send emails to and from your Personal URL

2) Ability to Use Existing Domains (ones that you already own) - in the old system, we could only let you use URLs registered through Xanga. But a lot of you already had URLs that you wanted to use for your sites - d'oh!  This was hard to pull off back then.  But thanks to new software, this time around we can let you use those existing domains! 

So if you're ready to take the plunge,

Click Here to Get Started

You can learn more about the feature here:

http://help.xanga.com/forum/personal-urls

- Marc

P.S. special thanks to Justin who did all the programming for this project!

A week ago we started an experiment using four different versions of the "Top Blogs" module to see which version drives the most traffic. Here are the results (note: these data represent a random sampling, not the actual number of clicks or users*):

These data suggest that Top Blogs works better than Most Rec'd in general. But if you look closely at the data for the first two modules, the results are pretty astounding...

• The first version generated the most overall clicks, but performed worst out of all four versions on spreading those clicks around to different users.
• The second version had the second-highest number of clicks (with about 12.5% fewer clicks than the first version) but was the runaway leader in spreading around those clicks (it sent clicks to almost four times more users than the first version).

So now we need your help!

It looks like we'll probably want to go with one of the first two versions of the module, but which one do you think we should choose for the Xanga frontpage?

* In this experiment, we randomly assigned a subset of all Xanga visitors to one of the four versions of the module (a same number of visitors went into each group) and then tracked the data on those modules. As such, these results do not represent the actual total number of clicks or different users visited from Xanga's frontpage over the last week, but they should be a fair representation of the relative volume of clicks sent by each version of the module.

Today we started experimenting with the "Top Blogs" module on Xanga's frontpage to see if we can drive more traffic to your Xanga sites with it.

First, we moved the module higher on the page - this move doesn't really require formal experimentation... the new placement should drive more clicks - woohoo!

Now, we're experimenting with four different versions of that module:

1. Top 10 "Top Blogs", in order - this is the version of the module we've been using for a while
2. Top 50 "Top Blogs", randomized - greater variety of posts, gives more people a chance to make it to the frontpage
3. Top 10 "Most Rec'd", in order - there's a lot of overlap between "Top Blogs" and "Most Rec'd", but there seem to be some breakout (and interesting) posts in Most Rec'd that don't always make it to Top Blogs
4. Top 50 "Most Rec'd", randomized - just like #2, above - offers greater variety and gives more people a chance

This one is a more formal experiment: we are randomly choosing one of the four to show each visitor (for the next week, you should be seeing only one of these four) and we are collecting careful click-through data.

We're going to run the experiment for about a week, crunch the data and then share the results with all of you to help us all make a decision on how best to use that module to drive traffic.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear from people seeing each of the four different versions - do you like the version you're seeing or do you think you'd prefer a different one? Again, we're agnostic on the four versions... we just want to find the most effective way to drive traffic. The data will help inform the ultimate decisions here, but your comments are definitely helpful as well.

Thanks!

We've been hearing anecdotally that some users are browsing Xanga less because of Footprints.

Personally, I do browse a bit less because I know people will see my footprints... but I also browse more, b/c sometimes I surf my Footprints and click back to other people. Net net, my browsing is probably about the same?

But in talking to Xangans, we're hearing the same story from a number of people:

• People are browsing other people's sites less...
• But they love seeing who is visiting their site!

Overall though, they're visiting less pages since we launched Footprints doh.

Two quick questions:

1) Do you browse less because of you know people can see your Footprints?
2) Do you have your settings set to browse anonymously, or to Footprints Lock?

Please let us know! We'd love to get a better sense for how people are using Footprints...

All of the site maintenance we've done recently (and some of the subsequent site funkiness) has stemmed from two big efforts that have been keeping us busy over here at Xanga HQ:

1) We've been massively upgrading the hardware that powers Xanga.

Some of the hardware was almost six years old - which is Methuselah-old for this type of stuff. The new stuff is faster and more reliable. It's also a lot smaller and more energy efficient - which means it costs Xanga (and the environment ) a lot less to run than the old hardware.

2) We've been upgrading the software that powers Xanga too

Along with replacing the hardware, we've also been overhauling the software architecture of Xanga. The ultimate goal, of course, is to help make things more reliable and maintainable. But this type of upgrade brings inevitable hiccups as well...

Now we're focused on stamping out bugs!

We know the recent changes have introduced some new bugs. And we know there are some long-standing bugs from the old system. With your help, we'd like to focus on fixing them!

• Known issues that we're currently working to fix:
  • Anonymous footprints aren't showing the location of the visitor.
  • Some emails aren't being delivered - particularly to yahoo and att.net, which includes bellsouth.net and other domains  (this one is primarily because different ISPs are rate-limiting the amount of email we can send to them). Please let us know if you aren't receiving email.
  • Usertag counts in the feedback log module are stuck at 0.

• Intermittent issues for which we need more information:
  • We've seen some reports about specific Xanga sites not always rendering properly.  It sounds like the css for the site isn't loading, which causes weird display issues.
  • If you're having a problem like this, please leave a comment.

• Recently Fixed Issues (woohoo!):
  •  Comment reply emails weren't being sent.
  •  View counts were updating slowly.
  •  Footprint feedback counts were updating slowly.

Just wanted to let you all know what we're currently doing to fix up the site. If you've been having any other big problems with the site (old or new) please let us know in the comments and we'll add them into this effort.

Thanks so much.

All Done: We'll be taking down the site on Friday starting at 6:30pm EST for about 15 minutes to finish our hardware upgrades.

This is the final downtime related to the big hardware upgrade that we've been working on for the past few weeks.  We'll post more details and photos after we get some sleep!

Thanks!

Dan