So I couldn’t sleep. This is bad because I have a Squash game with my uncle in the early afternoon tomorow. I ended up at a friend’s blog and wanting to comment, but unfortunately, I needed to get myself a Xanga account to do so.
Following is a republication of my Xanga review, first published moments ago on my Xanga page. Enjoy.
My Review of Xanga.com
I’ve finally found a reason to join Xanga: commenting on my friends’ Xanga blogs. Yes, this is literally the only good reason you can possibly have to join this horrendous so-called “service.” Every single feature provided by Xanga is provided elsewhere and is executed at least ten times better.
First and foremost among Xanga’s failings are their blatant disregard for Web standards. This has a powerful and direct impact on its users in the form of browser compatibility. The only way you’re going to get a halfway decent user experience browsing Xanga sites is by using Internet Explorer 6.
The worst offenses, at least for me, came in the form of JavaScript requirements and pop-up windows. Xanga’s insistence on using these techniques creates a mass of confusion as multiple windows try to open themselves each time one clicks on a link to do something. Reminiscent of the Pixies song, I keep thinking “Where is my window?!”
Worse, with my personal adjustments to my Firefox browser using the amazing Tabbrowser Extensions package, many of these windows never appeared at all which rendered my primary browser largely useless for using Xanga. Since JavaScript is more or less a requirement for using the site, many of Xanga’s features simply don’t work for anyone without this capability. Also, the whole site is an absolute mess when it comes to accessibility, but since that won’t even concern most people I’m not going to get into it.
Of course, that’s not all that sucks about Xanga. For instance, where are the comment previews? Oh, right, JavaScript! Naturally, Blogger, as just one example, has this handy feature (and it doesn’t require JavaScript!), along with spell-checking (which unfortunately does), completely customizeable (X)HTML templates (not just a silly, restricted header), a fantastic WYSIWYG post editor if you want it, and even SFTP support so you can post your blog on your own remote server if you’d like to. All this for the low, low price of zero dollars.
“Okay, but Blogger won’t let me have multiple profile pictures,” you might be saying. True, but LiveJournal does. Even better, LiveJournal’s focus on community makes keeping track of and organizing your friends’ blogs a snap. And keeping up with your seventy-million friends is made even easier by letting you read their RSS or Atom news feeds in your favorite news aggregator or reader, something Xanga doesn’t yet publish.
In addition to those bonuses, LiveJournal makes it drop-dead simple to join and post to community blogs. In contrast, Xanga pathetically offers blogrings as its form of community, which are really nothing more than lists of Xanga members who claim to be interested in a specific topic. Bafflingly, there is no search feature for Xanga’s blogrings, which means that finding the few blogrings you want to join out of the thousands that have been created is masochistic at worst and an exercise in patience at best. In response to this stupidity, hundreds of blogrings have adopted ridiculously decorative names such as “°°°//!ChRiS!°°°” (note the stupid symbols everywhere) in order to be listed near the top in Xanga’s default alphabetic sorting order.
If you think using Xanga to organize your social life via it’s “Events” feature, is going to help get you in order, then you’re in for a nasty shock. First of all, no body’s going to look at your events page out of sheer fascination, and Xanga’s not going to help you attract attention to it. No, you actually have to email your event to folks to let them know about it after you create it.
In all fairness, screw that, and get yourself on over to Multiply, which will actually make sure your friends get notified of your events via email alerts and news feeds! Moreover, Multiply offers numerous things Xanga can’t even begin to dream about, like classifieds listings, a personal photo album, and more.
For the geekier of us out there, Xanga is even more annoying. Have you actually tried to create your own header using valid, semantic markup and inline styles? Well, don’t bother, since Xanga actually filters out certain CSS attributes from tags such as the position property. Imagine my frustration after checking and re-checking my code four times only to discover that it had been altered without feedback right under my nose! Augh!
To top it all off, Xanga adds insult to injury as they slather my pages with advertisements for their own “Premium” service. It appears that they really haven’t yet understood that teasing users with innocent-looking links to features that are unavailable and then demanding that they pay for a feature other services provide for free is not the best marketing strategy. Besides, designing the home page like it’s 1996 (with its 74 validation errors and busy appearance) certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence in the reliability of the service.
To be fair, the one thing Xanga has that no other service has are “eProps.” What are eProps? I’ll let my friend explain that one.
Blarg. [eProps are a] 13 year old girl’s wet dream.
I agree with everything you have to say. When I signed up for Xanga a year or ten ago, I did it solely for commenting on friends’ accounts, telling myself I would make use of MovableType 2.xx or make my own blog eventually. However, I realized with the onslaught of college education and family drama that “eventually” would not be coming any time soon… so I started actually using xanga.
It was until VERY recently that I finally started taking control over the design as well as marking up my entries. Over the last week I’ve done some serious overhauling on designing my own blog [at xanga] and last night I decided I wanted a roll over effect that involved absolutely positioning (which brought me here).
I didn’t realize until I came here that they rewrote “position: _anything_” with “position: ‘static’”. That helped a lot. Broke through it eventually. Feel free to take a look at my xanga — their markup might be poor as shit, but you get a LOT of control. … though the feeds, quality of the community itself, and what not are still huge issues. I think I’m going to try and use the same markup for my entries across other blog communities (except a different design for each blog) — it’ll be an interesting challenge as well as experience.
Oh and if you’re really into web development, semantic markup and the likes of which — stop caring about validation ;) If you know your code is pretty, sensible, usable, and — most of all — reusable, then what does validation mean to you? In terms of markup you can always edit the DTD, and for CSS there shouldn’t be anything wrong with abusing ‘tricks of the trade’ as the specs are recommendations and there’s no unwritten laws going about between the community let alone the browsers at stake. Yeah. Xanga still sucks ass in both development and design departments though. Goes to show there’re wrong people in just the right places workin there(inf. architecture==important).
ROFL @ “Blarg. [eProps are a] 13 year old girl’s wet dream.”
awesome. well, take care stranger.
abed
2 May 05 at 6:28 AM