Monday, 09 September 2002
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Xangazon is Here!
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IMPORTANT UPDATE 9/10/02 11:31AM: Amazon's web services have been extremely sporadic for the last couple days. You can read a bit about their struggles here. The amazon folks say they're looking into it... in the meantime, if your searches are taking a long time to complete, please just try again later (after amazon has had some time to fix their services - haha... even the big guys have occassional trouble providing reliable service
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----------------------------------------------------"Xanga" + "Amazon" + marc's cheesy humor, which may get us in trouble with Amazon
= "Xangazon"
What is it?
It's a quick and easy way for you to add "Currently Playing", "Currently Reading", and "Currently Watching" selections to your Xanga Site. You can find some quick instructions here (I'll make a better instructions page soon).
Some of the cooler features...
(Says me, that's who
)- Layout control - we've provided four basic layouts for you to choose: two with pictures, two with just text. We kept the layouts pretty simple so that they can work with the other "look & feel" settings on your site (they should pick up the fonts and colors that you use on your site). You can also choose whether each selection appears at the top or bottom of your weblog posts. Click your "Xangazon settings" to check out your options.
- Automatic data grab - Xangazon is plugged straight into the actual Amazon.com database, so whenever you want to add something to your site, we can grab all the key info for you (e.g. title, artist, links and even pictures)! After you do a search, all you have to do is click on the search result you want and you're done!
- Xanga Top 50! You didn't really think we'd keep you in the dark over what other Xangans are adding to their sites, did you? Of course not
. We've created a Xanga Top 50 area where you can see all of the most popular stuff at Xanga currently (last 24 hours), this month (calendar month) or over all time (since the dawn of Xangazon). Check out the Xanga Top 50!
Some important notes
1. Right now, you need to use Internet Explorer to add stuff to your site. We were about to launch this thing two weeks ago, then it broke in Netscape and Opera - d'oh! Dan's still working on a fix, but we didn't want to make everyone wait any longer - so if it's not your browser of choice, our apologies - but you'll want to spark up the ol' Internet Explorer browser to give this feature a try.
2. We are already working on a module version of this feature (so you can put your selections into a more permanent side module)... we built the weblog version first and just wanted to get it out there for you all to play.
Oh, and here's what I'm currently watching
Currently Watching
The Muppets Take Manhattan
Starring Frank Oz ~ Directed by Frank Oz
see related - Layout control - we've provided four basic layouts for you to choose: two with pictures, two with just text. We kept the layouts pretty simple so that they can work with the other "look & feel" settings on your site (they should pick up the fonts and colors that you use on your site). You can also choose whether each selection appears at the top or bottom of your weblog posts. Click your "Xangazon settings" to check out your options.
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Comments (123)
Cool. I'm the second one here! But, I don't get it? Sorry.
well it was good for the minute i got to use it.
now it's down.
or least posting is down.
It's a cool idea! Got any idea why my submit button might not be working? Had a blog ready to post, but when I go back in, it won't submit! Puzzler!
Keep up the good work (and cheezy humor, LOL!)
Yeah, it's a nice touch, but there's something definitely weird going on now that the option has been added. New weblog entries won't go through, and comments aren't showing up in the comment counters.
Trish
Hi Axey (took most of this comment from a previous post of mine, but it's relevant here again)...
If you're a Premium member, you'll get a place to input your Amazon Associate ID (check out your "Xangazon Settings" to input your ID), and then we'll automatically configure all your Currently Playing, Reading, and Watching links to help earn you some cash through the program. Nobody's ever going to make a lot from affiliate commerce, but it's pretty easy for any site with moderate traffic to earn a few bucks a month (and that's enough to cover, say, the cost of Xanga Premium
One big issue you've heard us mention before: Xanga needs a way to defer the costs of delivering all of the pageviews for free Xanga Classic sites (xanga's currently averaging about 3 million pageviews per day, and rocketing ever upward), so on Xanga Classic sites, all of the links are configured for Xanga's associate account - we're hoping everyone likes this new feature, but it's also important for keeping xanga cookin' - finally, we have a way for Xanga Classic users to stick with the free service but still help us pay Xanga's hosting bill, just by using a cool new toy
KEWLS!!!
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Something i'm doing?
coo
Problem:
The Xangazon text does conform to Look and Feel settings, but not to Skins settings. Thus the text appears black (and large) on my skin, which has a black background, making the text invisible (see my blog today for an example).
Fixable?
It takes FOREVER to search for what you want. I waited for about 5 minutes...and finally just gave up. I don't really see the point of this anyway...it's not as great as you hyped it up to be. Boo.