Editor's Notes

Have you ever had a project in mind for years?  In your mind, you might slowly build up requirements, features, and uses for the hobby, tool, or service that you would like to use yourself or share with others?  Well, welcome to YakJive.com, the culmination of one such project that I have mulled over literally since I began copy-and-pasting technical tips and tidbits into text files for my later use.

I'm a techie.  Sort of.  I'm one of those techno-phobe techies who really just wants to get things done with whatever tools I have available.  For years and years, I contemplated how to get all of my technical tips, opinions, and tools into some kind of journal application.  In the bad old days, I thougth about building a stand-alone application that would live on my computer and store all of the information for me.  Hmm... not such a portable idea.  Then the web came around and I started a site or two to try to create an online journal, but editing HTML just gets to be a pain.

Along came blogs.  Honestly, I took one look and didn't even bother.  I spent enough time searching through other peoples' blogs for technical tips to know that the things are just too darned linear.  Although it's nice that some Java guru in Holland has a pet cat named Toadstool, I really don't care about Toadstool when I'm looking for a critical tip that will save me 5 hours of programming time on a rush job.  So if I have to browse through blog articles that look like Java-Toadstool-Java-Toadstool... forget it!

What I was looking for turns out to be something called Content Management.  Content Management is the science (art?) of allowing users to store, organize, view, search, retrieve, and manipulate their content.  Content can be documents, articles, links, and photos, for example.  A card catalog is a kind of content management for books, but is a little cumbersome to carry around in your backpack.  Along the way, I had heard of content management, but I had my own concept for making an online journal that wouldn't require a developer to setup and that would be easy to use to build a website and store tips, tricks, recipes, stories -- whatever I felt like -- in an organized manner such that if someone wanted to browse through my Java tips, they could do so without having to look at photos of Milo.

So what you are looking at (including the YakJive.com website), is the result of my dabbling in the Content Management / Do It Yourself Website building arena that is handy for me, but might turn out to be useful for you, too!

What can you do with the YakJive.com service?  Check it out:

• Build your own website
• Add your own content into categories that you define
• Add images and documents
• Use a drag-and-drop tool to layout your site like a newspaper, magazine, or even use it as a 'traditional' linear blog
• Have a bunch of stuff -- including web pages, styles, search engine sitemaps, and more -- autogenerated for you
• Get advanced and style your own site
• Invite other users to contribute to your site

"WHOA!!!" you say.  What was that last bit?  You read it right.  YakJive.com is also something called groupware.  What's groupware you say?  Groupware is software that allows multiple users to share the same application to work toward a common process or goal.  In the case of YakJive.com, think of your site as a newspaper.  Did you ever want to have a blog, but felt that at the rate of one blog entry per each rare free moment you had would mean a rate of about 1 per year?  Well, with YakJive.com, your wife, mother, mother-in-law, or inbred uncle Bubba John can all be users of your site with their own individual blogs as well as the ability to contribute to whatever newspages to which you allow them access.

That's right, there's a whole world of permissions built into this puppy, so that if you want to make it really easy for Bubba John to just log in and edit only his page, you may do so.  With our blessing.  Just don't forget that anyone who uses your site is bound by the same Terms and Conditions of Service as are you, which means if someone is being naughty on your site... they're putting your site in jeopardy.  So just make sure all your uncles and contributors can read before you invite them in.  (Probably good practice anyway!)  Then watch the articles really add up!

So now we invite you to give YakJive.com a try for yourself.  Create a site.  Add some articles.  Push publish.  Check out your website.  It's as easy as that.

We hope you enjoy the service and provide us some feedback.  We're happy that a hobby project can sometimes turn into something that's actually useful.  Wasn't Spam invented that way?  I'm sure that lightbulbs were.  Anyway, while we don't necessarily think YakJive.com is in the same league as Spam or lightbulbs (Yet!), we'll bet that it will give you that voice on the web that you always wanted.

There are many promotional tools out there to get your blog noticed.  One I found is called blog announce and may or may not be worth the trouble, but just takes a simple bit of info to get signed up.  Here's a link:

I've never gotten really big results from search engine submission services, but it can't hurt to use one of the free ones.  There's AddMe.com and many others.  I recently tried this one through my hosting service:

100 Keywords - Free Search Engine Submission