All About Xanga

Each site is officially called a "Xanga Site," commonly referred to as "Xangas." The sites are used largely by teenagers. Users are allowed to post any number of weblog entries per day, and they may post comments on other people's journals. Users may also customize how their Xanga looks using pre-made templates or custom HTML (sometimes known as Xanga skins or layouts). Xanga journals are used for many purposes, most commonly as personal journals.

[edit] Core features

All Xanga members receive a "Xanga Site", a website made up of a weblog, a photo blog, a video blog, an audio blog, and a social networking profile.

[edit] Weblogs

The frontpage of every Xanga site is a weblog.

Xanga first added weblogs to all Xanga Sites on November 5, 2000. Comments were added shortly later, on December 8, 2000, along with a social currency known as "eProps." Comment Tracking followed on January 18, 2001.

A core part of the Xanga experience is the ability to subscribe to Xanga sites. Subscriptions allow Xangans to stay up-to-date on other Xangas to whom they're "subscribed," and bring the latest blogs from selected Xangas to the user without having the user manually visit each site. Xanga first added an email subscriptions feature on November 30, 2000.[2] On January 17, 2001, this was followed by the ability to subscribe to a site using a web-based reader (and the ability to display your subscriptions on one's site).

Initially, Xanga allowed members to subscribe to each others' sites anonymously. Some users were troubled by anonymous subscriptions, and so during the week of July 15, 2003, support for this feature was discontinued. Since some users had been using anonymous subscriptions to try out subscriptions to other sites, on July 21, 2003, Xanga added a feature that allow members to sample a Trial Subscription to another site. This update also allowed member to hide individual subscriptions from public display.[3]

Subscriptions were originally called "Sites I Read," so some older users sometimes refer to them as "SIR".

[edit] Photos

Every Xanga site also contains a photoblog.

That said, until the spring of 2006, Xanga's photo features were focused on enabling photo uploads within weblog posts. Xanga first started offering photo uploading on May 1, 2001. Originally, photo uploading was available only to premium members, and was limited to 20 MB of storage (although this was not enforced). Then on April 7, 2005, Xanga overhauled its photo system to increase pic