Welcome to the official launch of Xanga 2.0!

Here’s how to get started:

1. SIGNIN

You can sign into your Xanga account right here:

* http://xanga.com/wp-login.php

You can use the same username and password that you’re used to, and it should work!

2. CHECK OUT YOUR BLOG

If you are premium or participated in our Xanga 2.0 campaign, your blog should be in the same location! For example, my blog is here:
http://john.xanga.com

If your blog appears, you should be able to go to your dashboard and start blogging! Your blog should even look similar to your old theme. (If it looks a bit off, let us know here and we’ll take a look!)
http://help.xanga.com/forum/themes

If your blog doesn’t appear (and you are either premium or contributed to our campaign), please let us know in our help forum and we will look into it!
http://help.xanga.com/forum/data-migration

3. CHECK OUT YOUR READING PAGE (TO READ POSTS)

Either way, you should be able to check out your Reading page under your dashboard!

It’s a great way to find updates from your subs and friends! Speaking of which, we made some name changes related to subs and friends, to help make it a bit simpler and more intuitive… you can read about the name tweaks here!

ps Thanks for your patience everyone… we will find a way to make it up to you!!

pps We are now officially in phase 2 (of four) of the Xanga 2.0 launch!

Phase 1: Data Migration
Phase 2: Site Tuning <—
Phase 3: Feature Prioritization
Phase 4: Building Together

The next month or two of work on Xanga 2.0 is going to be busy, so we wanted to share with everyone a roadmap of how we’re thinking about things… if you’re interested, you can read more details about the 4 phases here

The next month or two of work on Xanga 2.0 is going to be busy, so I wanted to share with everyone a roadmap of how we’re thinking about things!

We’re dividing the work on this project into four basic phases.

Phase 1. Data migration

As described here, we’ve imported over every account that we have on Xanga over to the new system so that anyone who could sign into Xanga can still sign into Xanga 2.0. (Try it here!) We’ve also imported over everyone’s subscribers and friends, so that if somebody was subscribed or friended to you on the old system, they’re now following you on the new one too. And f you had turned on privacy features like friends lock, then we imported that over as well. Same goes for Signin Lock, RSS feeds being on or off, and search engine accessibility. We’ve also migrated over everyone’s photos (25 terabytes+ of data).

Finally and most important of all, we’ve imported over 2 million blogs from the old system. If you are premium or if you pledged to our campaign, then we’ve already imported your blog posts into Xanga 2.0. If you don’t fit into the category but you’ve been active on the site in the following ways, we’ve created a backup archive of your blog data and can migrate you to the system if you’d like.

* We’ve archived the blogs of the hundreds of thousands of blogs where the user has logged in in the past 5 years and has at least two subscribers.
* We did an additional set of archives for 200k users who had logged in the past year and had at least 10 blogs.
* We’ve also archived the blogs of every single user that’s ever been premium at any point in the past…

And of course, a lot of you guys archived your own blogs using the old Xanga archive generator. If you send that to us, we can always import you that way as well.

We”ve just finished the core of Phase 1 tonight, and will commence with Phase 2 upon launching the site!

Phase 2. Site tuning

Once we go live tonight, we anticipate that it’s going to take some time for the dust to settle. It’s always a bit tricky to tune your servers to match the amount of load that’s being put on it. So during this phase, we will allocate servers and storage to best match the load that’s being put on it.

We’ll also work with anyone whose data didn’t make it over to get them onto the new system as quickly as possible! We’ll be streamlining this process over the next week…

Phase 3. Feature Prioritization

We have really and truly focused on migrating over the very core features of Xanga as well as as much of the data as we could physically port over. In some cases, we had to port over the features *in order to* be able to move the data at all; for example, we built a subscriptions engine (and merged friends and subs into it) so that we could import over all of the subscriptions and friendships over from Xanga!

Once we get all of the site data and servers stabilized, we’d love to work with you guys to pull together a list of features that you like to see on the site… and then prioritize them. For example”

* We are keen to make a front page that features everyone’s content… It could be a simple recent weblogs module or it could be a feature weblogs module like we had before. Something like this is a top priority for us and we’d love to work with you guys to make sure that we’re designing it just right.

* Also, we are launching with a very basic theme that we hope matches the look of your old theme.

* Another top priority for us is to upgrade the theme into a more easily customizable theme system that is both powerful and yet intuitive and simple.

Are these features you’d like to see right away? We’d love to hear from you on which features you’d like to see, so please chime in below.

Phase 4. Building together

Once we’ve prioritized which features to build, we’d love to get some of you guys involved as beta testers, customer service helpers, and all the other roles we discussed here. Please let us know below what role you’d be interested in playing, and we can setup group blogs where we can all interact.

—-

We’re currently in Phase 2: Server Tuning… wish us all luck tonight and in the days ahead! And thanks to everyone for your patience and support in making this all happen!

Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about what the difference is between Subscribing to someone and being Friends with them. As you guys know:

* You Subscribe to someone when you want to follow all of their updates on their blog.
* You Friend someone (and they friend you back) to create a closer relationship. Friendships also control privacy features (like Friends Lock) and are two-way relationships: you can’t just friend someone… they have to agree to friend you back.

Both features let you do some pretty cool things. So we made a list of what we like most about them:

* The ability to easily see someone else’s updates
* The privacy of being able to approve people before they can see your content.

That said, it definitely confused people that both features did something similar and yet had such different names… and also that there was no one place to manage them both. So we addressed the first by tweaking the name… and renamed subs and friends into a single feature called, you guessed it, Following and Approved Followers.

It really works very similar to how Xanga worked before, but with just a new name:

* FOLLOWING: If you want to subscribe to someone’s updates, you just go to their site and click the follow link. (If you want to stop getting their updates, just click unfollow.). Basically, just like a Subscription.

* FOLLOWER’S LOCK: You can also still lock your site so that only users who are following you can access your site at all. This is similar to how Friends Lock worked.

* APPROVED FOLLOWERS: If you want to approve all of your followers before they can see your content, just set your site privacy to Follower Lock. Then when someone attempts to follow you, their username will automatically be held for you to approve on your follower page.

(And for the record, you can still restrict access to your site to anyone who is sign into Xanga. This is still called Signin Lock!)

But in addition, you can now manage what was once two separate things (friends and subs) in a new and single page… your Following page linked from your site dashboard!

We hope that this approach is a little bit simpler and more intuitive… let us know if you have any questions!

Ok our last minute checks have been going well, so we’re going to start the migration to Xanga 2.0 in a few hours!

We will be taking the site down at midnight tonight (EST)… we’ll be physically moving our servers tomorrow, over the course of the day. We will be working on the migration over the weekend… and will be posting updates on the migration to Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/xanga

We hope to have the new Xanga 2.0 site up for you guys as soon as possible!  Please stay tuned to our Twitter feed for updates…