May 20, 2009
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Xanga, Expect Visitors!!!! A short history.
I'm going to take you on a "short history of Xanga", in it's own words, so to speak. The Xanga beta came online in late 1999. This was just a few short months after my own website, the inimitable AllThingsMike came online, but they got lots more visitors. Believe me, if I'd known about Xanga, and their capability for comments, back in 1999 I would have joined immediately. I think my website was split between geocities and the globe back then, right before I signed on with homestead. All the images and content in this entry were obtained by searches through The Internet Archive. I began the research on May 19th at about 4pm, and finished on May 20th at about 7:30pm...... Check out the links if you have time. Most of them work, and they're taking you to the past. MFN/ppf From 1999-2001:
Can't wait to get started?
Join Now!
Expect visitors! Whenever you add new content to your site, you'll be featured right here on the front page. Other Xangans love to see what new members are sharing with the community. Visitors to your site can mean more than just flattering feedback. Links to products such as books, movies, and music can make you money! If you write a great book review and your visitors click through the link and buy the book you can make a 15% commission on every sale.
Xanga is Passion. What's your Xanga?
We've eliminated the tedious technical hassles of publishing to traditional homepages. Forget about HTML and FTP, you will be publishing your first post within a minute! And Xanga is all yours. You can Customize your Weblog by selecting unique fonts and colors, and even design and upload your own header! Check out all Our Features.
John
view entire profileFriday, December 08, 2000
I was just thinking, "Where are all my eProps coming from?" And then Brendan reminded me that there's a page where you can see just that! And another one where you can see comments on your posts, and another one where you can see the latest subscribers to your site!
You can find all these links inside the modular called "Current Site Data", located on the left side of your private Xanga Site.
Many Voices, One Topic - Xanga BlogRings! Join an Existing BlogRing!Featured Content (November 14th, 2001. Check out RiottGyrrrl and you'll think you're visiting the blog of any popular Xangan even today. The link to "more featured" shows you what the "featured" page looked like back at the turn of the century.) RiottGyrrrl 9:48 am myblueheaven 9:21 am JackrabbitDaddy 8:10 am smartass_83 7:23 am wickedce 2:06 am From 2002-2004:Monday, August 05, 2002Featured Content is back up to 100 entries! We had to trim it down to 25 entries for a while, but monsur was able to make it a lot faster, so now it's back up to 100.
Here's what happened... The Featured Content list used to get updated every single time any Xanga Member looked at the page. It's a popular page and it's got a lot of info on it, so all the updating made the page really slow (or totally inaccessible). Now it gets updated just once every minute (and then cached).
Heh, so now it'll be slow only for the very first person to...
Wednesday, July 24, 2002Xanga Personals!?
Marc explains... Take a browse and let us know what you think - both about Xanga Personals and the new Xanga Frontpage 
Have 3:27 pm
Xanga NewsFriday, August 13, 2004NEW BLOGRING FEATURES
Attention all blogring leaders: you can finally delete abusive blogring members with a single click. In addition, you can use our new Member Approval feature to stop unruly members from just joining the blogring again. More from john
Check out mindlessWh0re below. Funny stuff. The entry you see might not necessarily be the entry from the link, cause the archive only took a picture of the URL at the time. MFN/ppf
Featured Content: December 29th, 2004 CaKaLusa 11:52 AM
LolaLovely 3:26 PM
luckstuh 8:55 PM
eFairy 9:13 AM
mindlessWh0re 10:20 PM
more featured contentClick on the profile pictures to go to the blogger's site at the time. Some of the secondary and tertiary links on the archive don't go anywhere. MFN/ppf
Featured Weblog Entries
From: Xanga Premium Sites 1. 
unpleasant types of sleepers there are 5 main categories of...
Total eProps: 206 | Total Comments: 107
Posted by wutuwaitn4 - 5/23/2005 at 9:08 PM2. 
Conjunction dysfunction, what time's the luncheon? Besides t...
Total eProps: 200 | Total Comments: 102
Posted by CaKaLusa - 5/23/2005 at 7:54 PM2005-2006
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
NEW PHOTO MANAGER
We just launched a brand new Photo Manager that makes it easier for you to upload and organize your photos! More from marc...
Remember when we lost all our comments. From John's blog in 2005:
Saturday, June 18, 2005COMMENTS UPDATE We have comments back up and running on the site!
All new comments are stored in our new database. We have restored a good portion of the old comments on the site as well. There are some comments between May 28th and June 17th that are trapped on an old database... we'll be moving those comments onto the new database over the next few days.
Ironically, the site maintenance we were trying to perform was designed to improve comment performance.
We're so sorry about the comment outage, and are working as fast as we can to resolve it - and also, to put measure into place to make sure it never happens again.We'll definitely post updates as we have more details.
Then, sometime in late 2005, a new blogger appeared who looked a bit like C.S. Lewis. His "Theologian's Cafe" almost instantly became the Xanga site to visit, and the Featured page started to look different, well, I mean the same, since this single blogger sort of took over the page after a while. (And wouldn't mind telling you exactly how he did it either!) MFN/ppf
Featured Weblog Entries
From: Xanga Premium Sites 1. Question of the day: Were the Berenstain Bears Jewish? Kids...
Total eProps: 296 | Total Comments: 156
Posted by CaKaLusa - 12/6/2005 at 12:51 AM2. 
I have been wondering to what degree was the 9/11 attacks su...
Total eProps: 208 | Total Comments: 114
Posted by TheTheologiansCafe - 12/5/2005 at 6:14 PM3. I am taking a rare day off work today for sickness. I woke u...
Total eProps: 198 | Total Comments: 119
Posted by TheTheologiansCafe - 12/6/2005 at 9:31 AMWednesday, August 09, 2006
Featured Weblog Entries
From: Xanga Premium Sites 1. 
Are we as a society too quick to give our opinion?
Total eProps: 298 | Total Comments: 167
Posted by TheTheologiansCafe - 8/20/2006 at 1:39 PM2. I was reading a post by RaVnR and it made me think about ice...
Total eProps: 254 | Total Comments: 139
Posted by TheTheologiansCafe - 8/19/2006 at 8:43 PMHmmmmm. MFN/ppf
Friday, October 20, 2006
Today Adam, Dave, and Janet are launching Friends Lock - a quick and easy way to limit access to your *entire site* with just a few simple clicks. more from johnAnother content module appeared on the front page in late 2006:
Boosted Content
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Looking for some new and fresh content? Check out the new Weblog, Photo, and Video frontpages! more from ChrisThursday, February 22, 2007
Xanga News
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Xanga for Life!
Due to popular demand, we're bringing Lifetime Premium back! It's been over 18 months since we stopped offering Lifetime Premium. Yet, we still get emails from people asking for it! more from chrisposted 3 days ago
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Photo and Video Pools
Have you ever wanted to share specific posts with people in your blogring? A little while ago we added Weblog Pooling to blogrings... and just now, we added Photo and Video Pooling too! more from Benposted 5/10/2007
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boost + stars = most starred
Starting now, if enough people give a lot of stars to a weblog, photo, or video, it will be automatically submitted to http://web.archive.org/web/20070604074926/http://star.xanga.com/. more from chrisposted 4/26/2007
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Now you can open up your Xanga!
Every site now has the option to allow anonymous comments! more from chrisposted 4/24/2007
Vote for the best. Help give a star award by voting here!2008 brought us the Featured Question:
Would you confront your best friend who talked about you behind your back ?
submitted by AbstraxcityApologies: I didn't code this too well, so the blog entry looked like the actual webpage, but I got tired after a while, and wanted to finish adding the content. Now I want to get off the computer. I'd forgotten about "Boost", and then "Boost plus Stars", and then "Stars". What do we have now? Oh yes. Top Blogs and Top Recommended. I was limited of course to the actual archived pages, and a lot of the secondary and tertiary links don't work, but enough of them did that I had fun going back to the past and seeing Xanga change and morph into the fine site it is today. HERE is an early blog page from John, Xanga's CEO, from 2000. Interesting that I found a lot of folks who are still plugging away, er, I mean, "blogging" away regularly who were here from the early days of the service. I found it very interesting to see the "popular" bloggers writing about contests and mentioning other "popular bloggers" of the time, even as far back as 2000. Then, as now, over time, there seems to be sites which become sort of virtual water holes, and then there are those who get moderate "airplay" in the Xangaverse. Some people who are excellent writers, photographers, and artists still don't get the exposure they deserve, perhaps, but I've found over the years, that unlike a lot of "faceless" web communities, Xanga has, for the most part, always promoted "community" and blogging here is a bit different, and feels more like a "family". I'll be here five years on Memorial Day, when baldmike2004 first clicked the "submit" button on his new blog. MFN/ppf -
Comments (24)
What an interesting path it has been. So many of these things I never even saw when I first started. Thanks for sharing.
sounds like you will get your 15minutes of fame.
or were you the mikey on the pulse? I don't think so now after I went to it. So you are just telling us about xanga and how it evolved? thanks I think.lol
Thank you, Mike, for this wonderful post. I forgot what Xanga is like in the old days.
that was interesting! so you've been here thruout it's growing pains...i'd be tearing my hair out...
I wasn't around to experience the "old days" of xanga...but thanks for the tour!
i'd found the archive site for xa some time ago and found it quite interesting too. sure did like the simpler way much better, but there's no stopping progress. you did a really nice job of documenting here mike! you have a much more active 'family' on here than i, but you're right, one does come to care about the people one knows on xa. blog on!
Hi Mike, Thank you for your comment on my blog today. Wow, I appreciate this entry. I joined Xanga end of 2004 so the initial history was educational for me. How did you manage to get all the history....Surely you did not copy them in that time with the idea of an entry in 2009? You mystified me!
@Zeal4living - Dear Jurgens, I mention at the beginning of the entry that I got this info from the Internet Archive. It's a website which has been archiving websites since 1996. If you type the URL of any website into the "wayback machine" box and click "take me back" you are given a series of links, organized by year, or the website in question. Secondary links on the archived page might or might not work. I tried to choose links which did, so if you click on one of the profiles 'featured" above, you are taken back to that blog at or close to that point in time. I can spend hours (and did) on the archive. I use it to track the progress of my own 10 year old website quite frequently.
Oh how far we've come! You know, there's a lot of of these features that I can't remember Xanga without.
What an amazing tour! I had forgotten some of the changes that I was around for, and others were before my time. I haven't had a computer all that long, and it took me a while to even think of blogging! It doesn't surprise me that you were quick to connect with the technology, if not Xanga itself. Thanks for the tour!
That's a lot to go through for a "short history" :p
Seriously, it's very interesting how Xanga has developed. I've noted changes since I joined in July, 2005, not really wanting to, but I was talked into it by another friend/blogger. I agreed to give blogging a try. I'm still here, but sometimes wonder if it's taking too much time away from other things I could be doing.
As you know from most recent post (no time to post everyday), I'm on Facebook as well. Now, I'm finding so many Xangans there, it's amazing. I have a difficult time with FB because of my old computer's slowness. I'm hoping to put my more than adequate hard drive in a friend's computer to increase CPU & RAM. FB has its attractions, but as my poem parody expressed, I prefer to stick with Xanga, primarily.
Thanks for your visits and comments. I appreciate greatly. Quote in Pulse - intentionally ironic.
~~Blessings, prayers 'n cheers
I had no idea the history of xanga. Thanks for sharing!
i liked blogrings a lot, back when that was the easiest way to find new blogs to read. i may return that. can't always trust what people rec, these days.
We going to get a FULL history someday?
Loved this, Mike.
I've been on xanga a loooong time, this is classic stuff.
*scratches my head*
cakalusa's been around that long, and on the front page too? wow o_O i never knew!
Hahahahah, I remember some of those. I joined back in 2004, wow, 5 years this December. And, Mike, for an old guy, you sure have a good body
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