| | When I was a child I blogged like a child.
Welshmnky is leaving.
But I would never leave you without a reason, and directions on how to follow.
Trust me. You want to. Here’s what Steve Smith from www.orderedlist.com has to say about Xanga:
Xanga is a ‘partially closed community.’ While public viewing of
content is allowed, participation in comments is not. Membership
is required, therefore discouraging non-members from joining in
conversation. This is disadvantageous for many reasons, first and
foremost being lack of public voice. Imagine if The New York
Times
only read suggestion letters from those with annual subscriptions.
They would miss the possible feedback, be it positive or negative, from
hundreds of thousands of newsstand readers across the globe.
Some might say that they don’t want public comments, or they only care
about dialogue with a few friends. That still means that those
friends still need a Xanga account to interact. There have been
many times when I have wanted to comment on a friends post, but was
unable to do so because I don’t (and refuse to) have a Xanga account.
Whether or not it is intended, it gives the impression that you don’t
care what the general public (or those friends who belong to that
group) have to say. And if you don’t care what they have to say, why should they care about what you have to say?
In the beginning, Xanga was popular because it made it easy to join
communities, to easily find other peoples sites, and be alerted each
time they contributed content. That era is past, Xanga is
outdated and ugly, and the internet around Xanga has progressed.
RSS makes it so easy to keep track of hundreds of sites without the
need for a closed, tracked online community. The flexibility
allowed by other blogging software like Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type,
WordPress, etc., far outweighs any community benefits Xanga used to
offer. So break free, open your eyes and your blogs to the rest
of the online world.
Steve Smith
www.orderedlist.com
RSS
This is the present and the future of news and blogging.
If you haven’t heard of it, check the link. It explains it better than I can. A great example of it is my.yahoo.com or even MSN.
They are all pulling RSS Feeds. You could potentially pull a feed from
any site with an RSS feed to my.yahoo.com and keep up on it from
anywhere. These sites or programs that pull all these Feeds from other
sites together are called Aggregators. I recommend this one: www.bloglines.com
the directions are pretty simple and it is the only aggregator that I
know that lets you watch xangas (Xanga doesn’t have RSS, this gets
around that somehow… This will allow you to keep up on all your friends
who haven’t left yet).
For my site for instance you can either just put my name in as someone who uses blogspot, or use my RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Welshmnky) and you’ll get an instant update every time I post.
The next question is one of where should you go from here if you leave
xanga. Well, do your research, and find an open community like Steve
talked about above. I’m going to www.blogspot.com , but there are lots
of others out there to choose from. If you know your html and such
pretty well you can just build your own. Those are the coolest. The
nice thing about RSS is that it doesn’t matter where you build your
site as long as you have a feed we are still linked.
A LOT of you are here on xanga because of something that Gwyn
and I started years ago at Bethel (and a good portion of you I just
happened to meet through xanga). You had no idea what a blog was, but
now look at you. You have become writers, each in your own degree.
Everyone from Brooke’s crazy antics with her ex and her son, to Side’s reporting on our extreme sports.
It’s time to move. The transition has been made easy. Follow again. You’ll be glad you did.
-Welshmnky-
www.welshmnky.blogspot.com
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| | Posted 7/6/2005 2:38 PM - 99 Views - 22 eProps - 17 comments
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