June 2, 2013
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Remembering Xanga:Part 3: Expect Visitors!!!! A short history.
Most of this was originally posted on 5/20/2009.
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. All the images and content in this entry were obtained by searches through The Internet Archive. Check out the links if you have time. Some 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 PM
2005-2006
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
2007-2009
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. I'd forgotten about "Boost", and then "Boost plus Stars", and then "Stars". The current iteration of Xanga has 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 site as 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 never got 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". MFN/ppf (originally compiled and posted in 2009, edited somewhat. 6/02/13) -
Comments (43)
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Whoa, Dan once had a different profile picture?! That was before my time, I didn't join until 2007 (as I remembered by downloading my archives today). Yeah, I remember blogs on the front page getting thousands of comments. Now even if Dan gets 100 it's a lot. Sigh.
That's the first time seeing a different profile pic for Dan. Is it sad that I had no clue on any of the between 2003-2009 (when I was active but not actively involved with the community)?
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