Blog Platform Review: Xanga

Xanga is one of the older blog platforms around; started in 1998 as a site for sharing book and music reviews, it morphed into a blogging service in 2000. Xanga is one of the most popular blog platforms, with a total number of users estimated at 27 – 40 million. Most of these users are believed to be teenagers or schoolgoers.

Xanga hosts weblogs as well as photo / video blogs; each user gets a “Xanga Site”. Unlike Blogger and Wordpress.com which provide subdomain based sitenames, Xanga sitenames are in sub-directory form. The test blog on Blogger was profyposts.blogspot.com; on xanga, the blog url is www.xanga.com/profypost.

Like Wordpress, Xanga offers a premium service – for this review, we chose the free version.

Signing up

Xanga’s sign up process was the easiest one so far; just enter your username, email address, and you’re ready to go. The initial screen provides an opportunity to update your profile; but if you’d rather skip it, you go straight to the post entry screen. Just two minutes after sign-up, the first post was up and published!

Posting and Editing

By default, Xanga activates the rich text editor; for novices, this is by far the easiest option. There is an alternate rich text editor as well as a plain text / HTML edit option, accessible from the settings menu. Creating a post is quite simple. The editor also provides options to upload photos, audio and video; add tags, enable or disable commenting, and keeping the posts private.

Customizing look and feel

After the rich variety in Wordpress, Xanga came across as a poor cousin; for the free service, the options to customize are limited to changing the colors of the background and text, using a header, and fonts. HTML and Javascript inserts are allowed, but this can  be daunting for a novice.

Paid users are allowed much more flexibility; Xanga Skins are available from other sites, and can be freely used.

Other features

Here, Xanga beats Wordpress hollow; against the 50 MB allowed in Wordpress, the free version of Xanga allows upto 1 GB of uploads. Premium users have more, including a Premium Plus option that offers unlimited space.

Xanga gives you the option to restrict viewership to other Xanga members, or leave it open to all; in a random check of recently updated sites listed on the Xanga home page, we found many users appear to restrict access. Commenting is also restricted to Xanga users only. Xanga also has “eprops”, which allows viewers to give bonus points to posts that they like.

In addition to comments and eprops, two other elements distinguish Xanga’s blog posting offering.

1)  Users can provide ratings to the content, with a rating system similar to movie ratings – Xanga allows a “safe mode” browsing, so that inappropriate content can be filtered.

2)  There’s also an option to show a “Currently listening to music” or “Reading a book”, sharing your activity with the world.

Advertising

Xanga’s free offering is ad-supported – Google Ads and banners appear on most pages. Consequently, unlike Blogger which allows you to earn from your blog, Xanga doesn’t permit any kind of commercial use. Wordpress.com on the other hand, doesn’t use advertisements, or permit them either, for the most part – there are exceptions, but as a rule, you won’t see any commercial elements on the hosted blogs on Wordpress.com.

Social Networking

Xanga encourages two kinds of networks: Blogrings and Metros.  Blogrings are groups of blogs linked by commonality of interest such as particular artists or activities. Metros are geographical; it allows you to link up with people living near you. However, neither of these has the flexibility of blogrolling.

Users can also provide profiles, with information on themselves as well as profile pictures. Profiles allow the ability to connect with friends, and to search for others. Xanga also allows tracking options that enable users to see who visited their blog, as well as geotracking of anonymous users.

Conclusion

The free version of Xanga is reasonably novice friendly; however, the restrictions on customizing the look and feel did leave us feeling unsatisfied, preferring either Blogger or Wordpress.com. At the same time, the large space allocation is a powerful attraction, especially if you’re looking to use photos, music and videos as part of your blog. Not surprisingly, Xanga blogs tend to be more multimedia oriented than text, attracting the younger generation.