Does Xanga offer RSS? @ Radio Free Blogistan

September 14, 2003

Christian Crumlish

A reader just sent me a comment looking for a tutorial on how to add RSS to a weblog. I saw from his URL that he is a Xanga user (The Populist), so I went to the Xanga site looking for info about RSS or syndication support and didn't find any. Does Xanga offer RSS in its basic or premium service?

INSTANT UPDATE: Looks like there is RSS support. To find the RSS feed for a Xanga site, just replace home.aspx with rss.aspx in the URL. So, for example, here is The Populist's RSS feed.

Posted by xian at September 14, 2003 11:25 AM

Comments

Wow! That was fast.

Thanks for the RSS feed, now what do I do with it?

Posted by: Scott at September 14, 2003 12:06 PM

I came up on your tip through a google search. Thanks for the info : now that I can bypass the obnoxious Xanga ads and view their blogs in my aggregator, a whole new realm opens up :-p

Kudos !

Posted by: Zork Zeno at March 7, 2004 5:51 AM

i also came across your site from google. THANK YOU for this info.

Posted by: vincent pv at May 13, 2004 10:22 PM

whew. you're on fire from google for the search "rss xanga". thanks for the info!

Posted by: ralph lee at June 17, 2004 12:06 AM

wow, thats great thanks. I found this on Xanga Addons.

Posted by: Chris at June 27, 2004 12:17 AM

I wrote a little PHP script that converts Xanga's RSS feeds into better-formed XML, if you're having trouble viewing them in your feed reader (for instance, Firefox's livebookmarks). A working implementation of it can be used at http://www.ephemeraleuphoria.com/xanga/rss.php?INSERTNAMEHERE [obviously inserting someone's Xanga name in the appropriate place].

Posted by: Michael Greene at October 19, 2004 12:13 PM

Excellent work, Michael!

Posted by: xian at October 20, 2004 11:04 AM

okay, here is a small program that takes advantage of the RSS xanga feed. Not sure how useful it is, but for what its worth, here is the link in case anybody is interested:

http://www.geocities.com/xangastalker/

Posted by: mm at November 13, 2004 10:31 AM

I wrote a similar script back in September that corrects the formatting of Xanga RSS so that it works with aggregators such as NetNewsWire.

In addition, you get a simple front-end UI if you just go to:

http://www.joshstaiger.org/XangaRssFixer.pl

It's written in Perl and the code is freely available under the MIT license.

A little documentation is available here:

http://www.joshstaiger.org/archives/2004/09/xanga_rss_fixer.html

Micheal Huynh also has a PHP port:

http://www.mikexstudios.com/archives/2004/10/03/xanga-rss-fixer/

Posted by: Josh Staiger at December 4, 2004 1:02 PM