TheXangaTeam's Xanga

Update on our Relaunch Xanga fundraiser!

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:17:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone for your support for our Relaunch Xanga fundraiser! With a month to go, we're almost half-way there (~45%)... with $26,879 out of $60,000 raised.

Thank you for your support!! It's very exciting... and in the meantime, we've been hard at work preparing for the potential migration over to a new WordPress platform!

We've gotten a number of questions, so I wanted to come up for air and share some answers here: More Here...

Relaunching Xanga: A Fundraiser

Fri, 31 May 2013 02:41:41 GMT

It's hard to believe, but Xanga has been around for over a dozen years. In that time, we've soared to great heights... and then come back down to earth. Through it all, we've stayed with the site for over a decade now.

We're now at a crossroads, as our lease is up soon on the networking facility where we've been hosting our servers. As the status quo is no longer possible, we've been working to figure out the best way for the Xanga community to move forward.

We've seen other sites go down different paths... some have sold their sites to the highest bidder, while others have doubled on their own platform. The thing is, it's really hard to grow a social site that has fallen from previous heights. MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal... lots of people have tried to resurrect these sites, and it has rarely, if ever, worked.

ANOTHER PATH

We started to wonder if there was another path. We started building the Xanga website back in 1999, and it's amazing how much has changed in the past almost 15 years! If we built a site like Xanga now, we'd use a lot more open source software - heck we'd probably even build on top of some of the existing open source blogging engines out there, and port users over from our existing custom platform.

We'd focus the site on what we have always felt was its core strength: the Xanga community itself. And we'd get the community a LOT more involved in running the site - especially when it came to fighting spam and trolls, the bane of any community site. It would be a blogging community by the people, for the people and of the people.

As we mapped it all out, we thought: "Is this possible... could we build this??" More Here...

Post-mortem on yesterday's downtime

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:55:48 GMT

We had some downtime yesterday for some users, and wanted to share a post-mortem on what happened.

Early yesterday morning, we got some reports that some Xangans couldn't reach Xanga.com. We were able to quickly confirm it ourselves, and also confirm that traffic was significantly down. However, there were still a good number of users who *were* able to reach the website... we could see them showing up in our server logs. Plus the site came up for us on our iPhones, even though it was down on our PCs.

So the servers were still up, but some users weren't able to reach them. That was a huge clue. About 3 anxiety attacks later, we were able to ascertain that most likely, the routing table on one of our bandwidth providers was broken. We got in touch with them and they were able to fix the issue... and service was restored to all.

We have been exploring alternatives to our current hosting setup. More on that soon... but in the meantime, wanted to share this post-mortem with you guys. If you experienced any downtime yesterday, we are very sorry!

Please let us know how the site is working for you now!

Fighting splogs, and some proposed tweaks to the registration process

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:49:38 GMT

Hey guys -

We've been getting hit pretty hard by spam blogs lately, aka splogs. A lot of the times the sploggers will just create a site and then... do nothing. Most of the account don't try to spam anyone; instead, they just sit there with a link in their profile. We have shut down a lot of these so-called "splogs", but they just keep coming. The worst part of splogs is that they are created in such a way that they are slowing down our themes database. As a result, some of our REAL users are having trouble creating accounts or editing their theme

To help address this, we're looking into ways that we can prove that our new users are actually real people. We already have a CAPTCHA in place, but apparently there are now companies in China and India that do nothing but hire humans to defeat CAPTCHA tests. We've tried a number of technical fixes, but a lot of times the technical fixes prevent real users from being able to register accounts. :(

So we've had to switch gears a bit. After some brainstorming, we've come up with a few new ways we can try and prevent these humans-for-hire from creating fake accounts: More Here...

Meebo Chatbar

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:55:22 GMT

Hey guys - we've loved hosting Xanga chat through our partner at Meebo, but they were acquired by Google this year and are changing their product priorities. As a result, they've contacted us about turning off our chat bar...

We've been looking into chat usage, and it's actually used by very few of our members. And we've been investigating, and turning off the chat feature should make Xanga sites load a bit faster. So we're going to be turning off the chat feature this afternoon.

Let us know if you come away with a faster browsing experience overall!

Request For Comment On Proposed Revenue Stream

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:27:02 GMT

Hey everybody,

We're trying something new to make more money to support Xanga.

Say you link to an Amazon product in a blog post. Here's the new part: we're going to be adding Xanga's affiliate codes to *some* of those product links.

Which links? Well, if you've already added your own affiliate code to that product link, we won't be adding our affiliate code.

Also, if your account has Xanga Premium, we won't add our affiliate code to your links ever.

Only in cases where you haven't linked using an affiliate code *and* you're a Classic member will we sometimes add an affiliate code.

I think this is an nice way for Xanga to make a little more money, without having a negative impact on the user experience. I don't expect Xanga to make a huge amount of money from this, but an increasing number of Xanga readers are using ad blockers. Hopefully, this will help replace that revenue stream for us. We're looking to try this out as a test sometime this week.

I'm hoping this will help the site support itself over the coming year, and serve as a counterpoint to the ad blocking that we're seeing. We work really hard to keep ads here as unobtrusive as possible, and I am hopeful that this fits the bill.

Could you guys let us know what you think before we move forward here? Thanks...

Thanks,

Bob

Update: Xanga's New Jersey Datacenter Is On Emergency Generators

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:47:32 GMT

WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Xanga's datacenter is now back on utility power! So we are no longer dependent on the emergency backup generators... Woohoo!

The backup generators would have run out of fuel at some point, so it's great to be back on utility power.

We're not totally out of the woods yet, since our datacenter needs to fix one of its backup generators in case utility power flakes out again. Also, I suppose our datacenter also needs to replace all that diesel fuel they've used up...

But we're making progress!

Hooray for electricity!

Thanks,
Bob

~~~

Hi Everybody,

I hope everybody is safe with Hurricane Sandy!

I wanted to give a quick update on what we know about how the hurricane has affected Xanga...

Our servers are located in a datacenter in Newark, New Jersey, which was hit especially hard with power losses and flooding.

The good news is that our servers seem to be OK. They're located on the 8th floor, so they should be safe from flooding.

There are two bits of bad news.

The first bit is that our bandwidth provider ran into difficulties from 2am to 10am EST today. So even though Xanga's servers have been online the whole time, you may have run into problems connecting to the site. It's possible that our network provider might run into more problems, but for now, the network seems to be OK, which is great.

The second bit of bad news is that our datacenter has lost utility power. So Xanga's servers are currently operating on emergency backup generators.

Hopefully, utility power will be restored before the emergency backup generators lose power!

There are two risks here. First, our datacenter's backup generators are in the basement of the building, along with the diesel fuel and fuel pumps. So there's a risk of flooding, which would disable the backup generators. At this point, we think this risk is minimal, but you never know...

Second, the generators may run out of fuel before utility power is restored. This would obviously take our servers offline.

We'll keep you updated as we learn more!

In the meantime, stay safe everybody!

Thanks,
Bob

Update on ISP issues

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:31:29 GMT

Hello all. I wanted to give an update on an issue we've been getting reports about. Some ISPs have been unable to connect to the Xanga servers over the past day or two, which has made it difficult for those subscribers to connect with our servers. The Xanga servers are 100% working normally, but some ISPs just aren't able to find us. :(

We've been working to resolve this issue, and believe we are getting closer to a fix. The good news is that we're making progress on resolving this problem! The bad news is that we have to work with various ISPs around the world and get them to do stuff. So it's taking some time.

I'm not sure if the affected users will see this post, so thus far, we have just been emailing back the handful of users who have written in (we've gotten about 20 emails so far). But I wanted to write ths update anyway, because many users have reported that Xanga works for them at work but not at home (or vice versa).

Because only some users are affected, this has been a very difficult issue for us to track down and reproduce — let alone to solve. Our traffic patterns showed that certain ISPs have been affected; for example, Xanga is down for me in New York (I'm on Time Warner) but works in our office and on my Verizon iPhone. As a result of the affected ISPs, yesterday visitors were down by a single-digit percentage. We're working with network and ISP providers to resolve the issue ASAP.

To all of our affected users: we're working to get the site back up for you ASAP! If you have Xanga friends who can't access the site, can you email them the text of this post? Also, spread the word to try out our free mobile apps (Android, iPhone) and see if that helps at all?

Thanks!

John

Photos, Pulses, Videos Coming Soon to Your Xanga Frontpage + Unlimited Protected Posting

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:15:37 GMT

Two quick updates for all of our users!

1) Photos, Pulses, Videos coming soon to your Xanga frontpage

We posted last year about our plans to have Photos, Pulses, and Videos show up on your Xanga frontpage:

If I post a pic from my iPhone directly onto my Xanga... I'm going to want people to see it! But right now it gets sent to a separate "photo blog" on my Xanga site, where it gets almost no traffic (we've looked at the stats - more on this in a later post).

We've addressed this issue in the mobile app by blending all updates - weblogs, photos, video and pulse - into a single, unified blog. For starters, it helps makes the app much more streamlined. But it also helps you find updates from your subs that you easily could've missed on the live site!

This is part of a major effort to focus Xanga on blogging. And it's been so awesome to see in action during mobile testing that we're going to be offering this new unified blog soon across the whole site, starting with interested users. Soon you'll see my weblogs, photos, pulses and videos all blended together on my Xanga site frontpage, at john.xanga.com.

We've made a huge amount of progress with our mobile app in recent months, and mobile uploads and posting is on the rise. So the time feels right to move forward here, and we're ready to launch this update soon!

If you'd like to keep photos, pulses and more off your frontpage, you can opt-out by tweaking your settings:

For Theme users:

Click "edit theme", then click the little pencil icon to edit your main weblog module, then adjust the new "Content" setting...
For Custom Look & Feel users:

Go to your "Look & Feel" settings page and adjust the new "Weblog >> Content" setting...

2) Unlimited Protected Posting for all coming today!

We're also working on allowing anyone to add as many users to your Protected List as you'd like. Previously this was a Premium-only feature. This update should be rolled by the end of today.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Just a heads up on Premium pricing

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 18:02:34 GMT

Please note: if you are an existing Premium subscriber with your account set to auto-renew, then you can ignore the post below!

If you're thinking about upgrading to Xanga Premium (or are an existing Premium member *not* set to auto-renew), you may want to lock in Xanga Premium's existing price now:

* https://register.xanga.com/premium/

We're going to be re-investing heavily in Premium over the coming months, in addition to adding lots of features to the site in general (hello, multiple protected lists!). As part of that, we will be increasing the price of Premium with the release of our next mobile app (around the end of this month or so).

If you'd like to lock in the existing rate, just click here (and make sure to auto-renew).

Please note: if you are an existing Premium subscriber with your account set to auto-renew, any price increases would not affect you. When you sign up for Premium auto-renew, your premium renews at the rate at which you purchased it.

Just a heads up! For now, nothing will change in the short term as we're super busy working on some of our previous announcements!

P.S. As we discussed, Lifetime Premium is shelved for now. Thanks to everyone who upgraded!