Getting RSS feeds from Xanga

A couple of friends blog with Xanga.com. I have been having a couple of problems with this blogging site. I'll talk about those later.

I started using Google's Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/) to get RSS feeds last week. There are a few annoying usability issues. Yet I like it because it is free, I can check my feeds wherever I have Internet connection, and that it re-uses my GMail login.

I have put my friends' blog feeds into the reader one by one. I have been successful in doing so for MSN Spaces and Blogspot.com. However it wasn't obvious how to get RSS feeds from Xanga.com. There is simply no indication on the blogging site.

But again, this is not just a problem of mine. A quick search on Google.com brought me to the right solution. Here it is: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/6303

Now that I have added my friends' blogging sites on Xanga.com into the Google Reader, I have encountered the next issue: the Big-5 feeds shown in the Reader are completely unreadable, no matter which encoding I pick within Internet Explorer.

There are always something far more important than checking friends' blogs. So reluntantly, I will continue to open up those blogs in a separate browser window. I do think that I made the right choice for choosing Blogspot.com over Xanga.com.

PS. If there is an easy way to get Xanga.com Big-5 feeds to show correctly in Google Reader, I'd still be interested to know. Thanks.