January 6, 2003

• XANGA UPDATE

  
  

  We’re scrambling to fix the issues you’ve identified in the comments recently.  Some of the fixes are done and some are in the works… so I thought we’d give a quick update, to let you know where things are.

  
  

  MAC FRIENDLY(er)

  
  

  
  

  Thanks to testing by Deevaa, suggestions from HomerTheBrave, and fast action by Marc and Monsur: Xanga sites are looking good again on Macs. 

  
  

  We really need to get a Mac for the office, for testing purposes.  We don’t have the funds now, but hopefully in a few months.  I’d love to get Xangazon working on the Mac!  An xTools for Mac would be nice too, but we can’t do that til Microsoft releases a better browser for Apple.

  
  

  JAVASCRIPTS

  
  

  
  

  We’ve finalized the list of trusted javascripts sites that we’re going to support.  You can divide pretty much divide them into four categories:

  
  

  
  
  • Counters: Sitemeter, OKcounter, Bravenet, NedStat, Web Site Traffic Report, HostedScripts.com, YesCounter.com
    
  • Birthday Countdowns: Jippy.com
    
  • Chat Boards: ChatterBox
    
  • News Links: Moreover

  
  

  Thanks to everyone who suggested sites.  Now that we’ve finalized the list, we’ll be rolling this out ASAP.

  
  

  LOOK AND FEEL OPTIONS

  
  

  
  

  While we are adding Transparency to the the Left Modules and Search Bar, we thought we’d take advantage of the opportunity to automate the text alignment of the Left Module with a pulldown.

  
  

  We’ll roll these look and feel pulldowns out tomorrow: hopefully this should take care of most of the feedback we’ve gotten so far.

  
  

  We’re also working on revamping the Calendar, in response to feedback.  It’s tricky, because the old Calendar is awfully database-intensive…  so we have to figure out something tricky there.

  
  

  A little update on things behind the scenes here at Xanga: our servers have been MUCH happier over the last day or so.  Hopefully Xanga has seemed noticably faster?

  
  

  It should get faster next week too, when Dan installs a bunch of servers that are coming in.  Our vendor has been promising us the servers “next week” for three months now, but we feel like the latest “next week” has more credibility than the last twelve “next weeks”.  It’s like they say about re-marrying your ex: it’s the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.

  
  

  UPDATE:

  
  

  
  

  We considered Tag-Board.com, but there’s a technical issue here: they require an “iFrame” to work and we don’t support those in the right-module.  As a result - even before we put in javascript restrictions - we noticed that most people weren’t using Tag-Boards on Xanga…  We considered just putting it in anyway, but we have to take customer service into account (if we supported the javascript code, we’d get about 10 emails a day from people asking why their Tag-Boards aren’t working).  Until Tag-Boards moves their code out of an iFrame, I don’t think we can support it.

  • 11:49 pm
  • 53 Comments