As John mentions, we’ve added a few more javascript counters to the approved list.  These include: Sitemeter, OKCounter, Bravenet, Netstat, Web Site Traffic Report, Hosted Scripts, YESCounter, and Jippy.  Let us know if you find any issues with these scripts, or if there are other scripts you’d like to see available in your Xanga Skin. 

Ok, the javascript fix mentioned earlier is ready. You should now be able to add Moreover, Sitemeter and Chatterbox code to your Xanga Skin. If there are other trusted javascript sites you’d like added to this list, just let us know.

The response to the Xanga Skins Directory has been overwhelming!  In order to process your submission quickly, there are some guidelines we’d like you to follow; Marc lays it all out here.

Javascript & Xanga Skins

Lately many of you have been asking about how javascript works with Xanga Skins. There are two ways of including javascript on your site: placing the javascript code directly in your page source, or including a javascript file from an outside source using the SCRIPT SRC tag.

Right now you can embed javascript code in your Xanga Skin’s source, but you can’t include a javascript file.

The reason for doing this is that malicious javascript code can read your cookies and wreck other havoc. Javascript embeded in your source doesn’t suffer from this issue, since we can strip out any malicious code. But an included file is not under our jurisdiction, and can execute any code it wants. Naturally we don’t expect any Xanga user’s to implement such nastiness, but we still have to be careful.

If you write your own javascript code, I recommend placing it directly in the source of your Skin, rather than using includes (This also makes it easier to share your Xanga Skin in the Skins Directory).

But for users of Moreover, Sitemeter, Chatterbox, and other services which legitimately use javascript includes, this can be a source of frustration.

As a solution, we will soon allow javascript includes only from certain “trusted” sites. The list of sites is small right now; Moreover, Sitemeter and Chatterbox seem to be the most popular on Xanga.

If there are any others you’d like to use, please let us know. And as always, if you have any questions or suggestions on how to improve Xanga’s javascript experience, please share; there are Xangans with some serious javascript kung-fu out there, and we’d love to hear what you think!

Ever since we launched Xanga Skins a few months back, people have been wondering: how do I get a Xanga Skin? How do I show off my Skin? Now the answer to both those questions comes in one package: the Xanga Skins Directory! Here you can discover a Xanga Skin that’s just right for your site, or even submit your own for others to use. Its like Personals for your Xanga site! Enjoy!

Coming Soon! A Directory of Xanga Skins. It will be a great way for you to get a new design for your site, or show off your own Xanga Skins handiwork. We are currently taking submissions for the directory, click here to submit your Skin.

fuego_de_noche brought up a small nit in Xanga Skins. The “taglines” CSS definition wasn’t spanning the whole tagline, so only the timestamp had the approriate CSS. I’ve changed this into a DIV that is applied to the entire tagline, just how it should have been in the first place.

Based off Alice‘s suggestion, I’ve added a few new tags to Xanga Skins:

• <$Signin_Link$> – Returns the link to the signin page.


• <$Signout_Link$> – Returns the link to the signout page.

Those two are pretty simple, the next two tags give greater power to your site, allowing you to emulate the header taglines on regular Xanga sites (ie the “xanga – join – signin” links at the top right of each Xanga site, which change based on whether the user is logged in or not):

• <$Signin_Tagline$> – If the user visiting your site is signed in, this tag displays a text link labeled “signout”; otherwise it displays a link labeled “signin”.
• <$Private_Site_Tagline$> – If the user visiting your site is signed in, this displays a link to their private site, with their username as the link text. Otherwise it displays a “join” link.

Based on these tags, this is how you’d emulate the Xanga header taglines:

You can get information on these and other tags by visiting the Xanga Skins Reference.

The Xanga Skins Tutorial is complete! If you’ve ever wanted to add a Skin to your site but didn’t really know how, consult this tutorial. As always, let us know of any suggestions, changes, or confusing sections. Hope this helps!

So the XangaSkins site redesign is here!  It is a blatant ripoff of Lycos, but hey, it is really a fun design!  Next step: finishing the tutorial.  (Yes I know the design can be a bit screwy in Netscape, and yes, I know why.  But I just don’t feel like fixing it now…)