Xanga and MySpace have been trying to catch up to the more respectable blogging services lately. Both services now have more “friendly” URLs for every blog’s front page. Xanga finally upgraded their feeds from the ancient RSS 0.91 format to the more modern RSS 2.0, thereby breaking Planet Xavier for a day last week, and MySpace recently added support for categories.
So today the nice folks at Xanga decided to introduce yet another change: change every single URL for every single entry ever posted there. Naturally, Planet Xavier choked on the news, and so all these old Xanga entries are back up. I hope you’re now used to this happening.
I really should implement an option to exclude every entry timestamped at a particular time, so I can quickly remedy any issues like the one today. Maybe after I finish my next research paper.
The one thing Xanga was still missing was the ability to give titles for blog posts. Xanga was the only service not to have a special Post Title field; Google fixed that issue a few years ago when they bought Blogger. Since John Ariosa had been titling his posts anyways, I figured I’d get Planet to use those titles correctly. So now, Xanga users who wanted to title their posts would simply enclose the post title like so:
<h4>Watch Uncle John’s Men (the Quiz Team) every Tuesday at Cincinnati State!</h4>
I finally got that feature working yesterday, but no: today Xanga had to announce that you too can title your posts. Without having to resort to my little hack. Fooey.
Now all Xanga has to do is implement TrackBacks, and I’ll have no reason to dislike Xanga. Well. Maybe.
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