June 26, 2014

• It’s been a long time

  and nothing has changed.

  it’s been a year now since Tom & the guys cajoled us into giving up our hard earned dollars to “Save” Xanga. Telling us first that Xanga would go belly up at the end of June, then Mid July, and finally at the end of August. While the extensions were flying, so were the Xanga Team’s fingers in answering our every question —- until Xanga 2.0 was given birth and since that point, not one question has been touched. I guess money buys you answers.

  It’s been a year now, since Tom & the guys cajoled us into saving this website. And has it grown?

  I stopped by SaintVI’s site just now (because I knew the link would work… ) and she’s getting 2-7 comments and still posting pretty regularly. She always was an active one…. in April of this year (2014) she actually posted over 30 new blog posts. I can remember when I was doing that many per month. But that said, comparatively, she’s getting less than 1/3rd of what she used to in responses. A year back she was pulling 15-30 comments per post.

  It’s been a year now, and all that’s come has been stagnation. No growth.

  It was my understanding that our money was intended to help build something new and solid —- a phoenix rising from the ashes —- and yet nothing has come of it…. and our money merely vanished into the ash pit of what was Xanga 1.0. We gave — we were promised something grand to come…. and nothing but silence has been given ever since.

  We were left alone to figure out how to work with what they left us. No tutorials. No improvements. No adjustments. And worse — if we tried to adjust any of our older posts, we lost all the HTML coding that carried over from Xanga 1.0 to the new one. (I Know… from personal experience… that’s why I stopped editing my older posts.) Any color coded scheme previously set up — once you tried to spell check or make a grammar correction — vanished, never to be seen again. I gave up trying to catalog what I had previously written… and even gave up posting, simply because it all seemed so pointless —- like I was only talking to myself now.

  It’s been a year now… and whereas I used to post between 10 – 30 posts a month, because I had something to say, and I cared to make my point at Xanga, now, and I knew I would get feedback that would cause me to pause, reflect and maybe even change my mind — now, I’ve given up. And it would seem that many of those who hung around did too.

  It’s been a year now… and there’s no grand celebration, only the creeping expectation that this one year anniversary will find the Xanga team pushing for “Subscriptions” — only to find that no one is interested… because they pulled the wool over our eyes last year, and this year…. no one cares any more.

  It’s been a year now.

  Welcome to the sad celebration of the death of Xanga 1.0, a living breathing dynamic community which still gave Dan “Theologian’s Cafe” over 100 comments daily, which still had many interested participants who were willing to browse and reflect and comment, which still had newcomers even up to the end….

  And welcome to Xanga 2.0….

  which we won’t talk about, I guess.

  And for the record, if they even hint at asking me for money this year — I’ll slam the door in their faces.

  • 1:41 am
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