It seems that the BlogChat (see *diamond* access icon and legend above) is proving itself useful not only for social and entertainment purposes, but for matters of information sharing and problem-solving also. 

Last night, Captivated came on the chat and asked me to look at a .zip link of hers that was not allowing access for downloads from her site.  After toying a bit, I determined that her external site provider was preventing the direct download, so I gave her a workaround.

And earlier yesterday, john (xanga ceo-type) showed up on the chat (his second time there, though this time I wasn't hosting, namaste was) and actually blogged here about what he shared with those in the chatroom.  He even hinted that "Maybe we'll schedule a regular blogchat or something, so people can ask questions about xanga."  Cool.

With regards to making the BlogChat more ubiquitously available throughout xanga, I'd like to share the hosting privileges out with a few more trustable bloggers (so far: namaste, seanmeister, and myself).  The three conditions I'd like all hosts to adhere to are: 1) don't spoof each others identities (don't pretend to be another host), 2) don't pass along the hosting privilege without informing me (I'd like to keep track of who the hosts are), and 3) don't leave the chat "open" (e.g., on all night) without active moderation.  The last point, I believe, is important so that when people see the green *diamond* indicating that chat is open, and they go there, there is actually someone to chat with.  If this chat were to become furiously popular, then leaving the chatroom always open would make sense.  But until/unless that moment arrives, my feeling is that nothing's worse than to be led by high expectations into a chatroom and find everything vacuously dead.

So if you're interested, let me know.

Finally, I'd personally like to give a big thanks to seanmeister for helping me clean up my "frankensteinian" search engine proliferation.  Although the xanga search has been restored, in the interim, I found a free third-party search engine (Atomz) that could provide me with incredibly detailed search results. However, for my purposes, I created five separate searches--and had a simple search box for each one on the sidebar as well as five advanced searches at the bottom of the page.  Just a little bit cluttered, no?  Well, seanmeister sent me the code to consolidate them into a dropdown menu system--and that's now implemented.  Thank you, Dr. Seankenstein!