Lately I’ve been having a lot of minor issues with Xanga which is beginning to culminate into a general dissatisfaction with the blogging interface. In the past there have been minor issues – the fact that they don’t use RSS is a big deal to me, but it all starts when they started rolling out their new editor. They really did a lot to ramp things up, but I discovered a huge potential issue. A few weeks back I was in the process of writing a huge entry when I was in the process of doing a few Edit > Undo commands when the next thing I knew half of my blog entry was gone. When I tried to Redo, nothing happened – everything was gone. I was really frustrated and attempted to submit a condensed version of the entry. A few nights later I made another entry, and the same thing happened. At that point I had no problem with switching back to the older editor.
The kicker came when in these last few days when I signed up for a Flickr! account. For those who don’t know, Flickr! is a community photo hosting site, and it also has a lot of great options available for blogging. One of which is the ability to add some random photos the margins of your blogs. I copied and pasted all of the different variations of the code- but nothing worked. After doing some reading, it looks like Xanga won’t let you use any external scripts. I understand that there are some potential security risks, but at the same time it shouldn’t prevent you from using some of these awesome new blogging features that are being released.
A few months back I played around with Movable Type on my family’s web space, and there were some parts that were really appealing. I thought I didn’t have enough time to learn/try a new blogging software, but after what’s going on with Xanga I’m really reconsidering. I’ve decided for the time being to post both in Xanga nad MT for now, and see where things go. But for people on my Xanga, it might be helpful to bookmark my new Blog site for the time being. I would love for you to keep reading!