me

Finding Old Xanga Posts Right Where I Left Them

04 Feb 2021

The most popular blogging platform of 2005 holds many of our most embarrassing online musings. It would be a shame if someone found them!

I wondered recently if I could dredge up some old Xanga posts from the mid-00s and relive that sweet era of the internet where many of my friends were just beginning to stake out their own online presence. To me, this small epoch represents a kind of golden age: people wanted their own space online, without much hassle, and social media hadn’t yet blossomed into another engine driving corporate interests. Plus, you could learn a little CSS if you were inclined. (What happened to this practice? Bring back custom stylesheets!)

So, where to look? Curiously, web.archive.org rarely yields any useful results, although I remembered it working some time in the past. With that out of the way, I poked around archive.org a little more, and came across this massive trove of Xanga content. Unfortunately, there are 2 problems with it: firstly, it’s massive in its totality, and exceeds my storage/bandwidth/attention span. Second, the archive was captured in 2013, well after the heyday of Something Corporate, and also after Xanga introduced its weird profile locking feature. Many pages scraped at that time would inevitably greet you with a prompt to log in before being allowed access to the page.

At that point, I decided to try looking at the email address I had used around that time. Luckily, I was an early adopter of Gmail, from back in the days when the service was still invite-only. It probably wasn’t the email I had when I originally signed up for Xanga, but I would have been using it in my freshman year of high school.

I had long forgotten this, but it turns out that Xanga used to send out regular digest emails to its users, which would contain new posts from blogs they followed. Through my original Gmail account, I was able to pull a few hundred of my friends’ posts, but sadly not my own. Nevertheless, it was great fun looking through some of the things that were written and shared back then. I’m curious to know if anyone who followed my blog also has access to these old emails, as they seem to be the most accessible way to retrieve Xanga posts that are meaningful to you.

2019, Ian Wright. ⚖ MIT

Finding Old Xanga Posts Right Where I Left Them

04 Feb 2021

The most popular blogging platform of 2005 holds many of our most embarrassing online musings. It would be a shame if someone found them!

I wondered recently if I could dredge up some old Xanga posts from the mid-00s and relive that sweet era of the internet where many of my friends were just beginning to stake out their own online presence. To me, this small epoch represents a kind of golden age: people wanted their own space online, without much hassle, and social media hadn’t yet blossomed into another engine driving corporate interests. Plus, you could learn a little CSS if you were inclined. (What happened to this practice? Bring back custom stylesheets!)

So, where to look? Curiously, web.archive.org rarely yields any useful results, although I remembered it working some time in the past. With that out of the way, I poked around archive.org a little more, and came across this massive trove of Xanga content. Unfortunately, there are 2 problems with it: firstly, it’s massive in its totality, and exceeds my storage/bandwidth/attention span. Second, the archive was captured in 2013, well after the heyday of Something Corporate, and also after Xanga introduced its weird profile locking feature. Many pages scraped at that time would inevitably greet you with a prompt to log in before being allowed access to the page.

At that point, I decided to try looking at the email address I had used around that time. Luckily, I was an early adopter of Gmail, from back in the days when the service was still invite-only. It probably wasn’t the email I had when I originally signed up for Xanga, but I would have been using it in my freshman year of high school.

I had long forgotten this, but it turns out that Xanga used to send out regular digest emails to its users, which would contain new posts from blogs they followed. Through my original Gmail account, I was able to pull a few hundred of my friends’ posts, but sadly not my own. Nevertheless, it was great fun looking through some of the things that were written and shared back then. I’m curious to know if anyone who followed my blog also has access to these old emails, as they seem to be the most accessible way to retrieve Xanga posts that are meaningful to you.