TheXangaTeam's Xanga

Brief DNS outage

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:46:26 GMT

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!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:19:43 GMT

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!

Driving More Traffic to Xangans - the Results!

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:38:26 GMT

Update (6/12/09): we've just updated the frontpage to use the overwhelming favorite: Top Blogs, Randomized. Thanks for all your input!

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*):

Module Version	Total Clicks	Total Different Users
1) Top Blogs - Top 10, in Order	3,549	87
2) Top Blogs - Top 50-60, Randomized	3,103	340
3) Most Rec'd - Top 50-60, Randomized	3,018	230
4) Most Rec'd - Top 10, in Order	2,721	100

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.

Driving More Traffic to Xangans - An Experiment

Fri, 29 May 2009 15:43:19 GMT

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:

Top 10 "Top Blogs", in order - this is the version of the module we've been using for a while
Top 50 "Top Blogs", randomized - greater variety of posts, gives more people a chance to make it to the frontpage
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
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!

Footprints Feedback

Wed, 27 May 2009 03:32:09 GMT

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...

Xanga Fixes - Known Issues & Bugs

Mon, 25 May 2009 17:53:52 GMT

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.

Done: Site Down for Hardware Upgrade

Sat, 09 May 2009 00:10:28 GMT

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

Blogging Communities in the Xanga Network

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:31:49 GMT

We've gotten a lot of requests for what we're calling Xanga Network sites (like Mancouch or Momaroo).

A bunch of ideas for Network sites have been submitted to the Ideas forum:

Artists - submitted by xxbabyjen_babybrittxx
Atheists and non-Christians - submitted by LiLbabeSwT and LadyLibellule
Book lovers - submitted by deposed_queen
Dads - submitted by Romans_837

At the same time, we've also been getting emails from various users asking us if they could launch their own Network sites using their own URL's. A few users have even started turning their Xanga sites into collaborative blogs .

Vanedave started a collaborative sports site at http://bfnsports2debate.xanga.com/
Edlives is creating a collaborative site about autism http://autisable.xanga.com/

Then it hit us: we could solve both problems, and create the ability for anyone to create and manage your own blogging community! You could not only manage your own blog, but you could host blogs by members of your community. More Here...

Site Maintenance - All Done!

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:13:09 GMT

Update: Site is back online!

We need to take down the site to upgrade some of the servers today.

The site will be down starting at 3:15PM EST and will be back up before 3:45PM EST.

Thanks,

Dan

Just Say No... to an Idea

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:15:21 GMT

Moniet suggested we add a no vote to Idea voting:

With this current system, all that is discovered is that some people like the idea suggested...which is obvious if it's been suggested by more than one person. A vote implies a choice, all this is is validation. Add an option for saying NO, not paid for with credits, but free. Then it will actually be a vote, and not just agreement.

So we went ahead and did just that! You can check out all the top ideas here, and vote no on all the ideas you dislike:

http://www.xanga.com/ideas/?f=0

This is especially cool because now you can't just buy Yes votes with a plug. If you plug your Idea, you're risking that other people will say No. That really helps even the playing field.

Let us know what you think!