Jive Like a Yak

The YakJive service could be described as a content management tool.  The term "content management" is an industry term used to describe services and tools that allow users to store, search, manage, and view various kinds of content.  Types of content can include text articles, documents, photos, movies... basically anything that can be stored as a file in electronic format.

YakJive offers you the ability to store articles, photos, and some documents while also providing a simple interface for generating a website where you and anyone else on the web can view your content.

YakJive.com provides a set of template CSS' that may be used as-is or modified by our users. We will soon be adding an interface for you to add up to 2 Mb of images to help you style your site, as well!

Ecards offer an easy way for you to send your friends messages using a simple Web interface. Ecards often have a photo and message text. If you choose, anyone can send one of your photos that you upload to YakJive.com as a free electronic greeting card.

HTML, or the HyperText Markup Language, is one of the tools that you use to create web pages.   HTML gives the web developer a set of codes to embed in a text document that tells your web browser how to display the text.

The best part about YakJive.com?  You don't need know HTML because it's all autogenerated for you! 

If you choose to learn a little HTML to embellish your articles or your About and Legal pages, more power to you!  The simplest HTML elements that might be useful to you are:

<p>	This element indicates that the next line is the start of a new paragraph.  Paragraphs may have special styles associated with them.
<br>	This element indicates that there should be a line break.  Line breaks will generally not reapply paragraph styles.

One of the most useful tools from the Wizard interface is the Layout Editor. From the Layout Editor, you can rearrange Newspages on Sections, create new Section, create new Newspages, and change Newspage properties.

You may find, over time, that the Layout Editor is more useful for adding Newspages and Sections than the basic Wizards.  That's great!  We're happy that it's so useful.

Map's, in the YakJive dictionary, are two-dimensional representations of the Earth's surface showing the location of any of your articles that have coordinate info!

Newspages group articles with related content: Food, Wine, Movies, Parenting advice, and so on. Newspages themselves are organized into Sections. The latest number of entries to the Newspage, determined by you, will be shown on the main Section page.

RSS, also referred to as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a tool for exposing a little bit of information about your website to online content tools that allow users to browse through headlines or summary information before 'clicking' in to a particular website.

Every YakJive.com Newspage is generated along with a RSS file that can be viewed by RSS browsing tools.  Here at YakJive, we publish RSS 2.0 type XML, which is generally not important to most users, but may be important if you're experiencing technical difficulties reading the XML.

Look at the top of each Newspage above the table of contents.   You should see a link for RSS 2.0.

Websites created by YakJive.com can have only one Section, or many Sections, determined by you.

One Section gets designated as the "homepage" Section. The main page of this section will be the main page of your root website.

A sitemap is a file that lives in the root of your website that tells search engines which pages on your website to search.  YakJive automatically generates a new Google-style sitemap for you every time that you publish your website... so your sitemap is always up to date.  This helps ensure that your content is getting searched on the web.

The link to your Google sitemap file looks something like this:

http://www.yakjive.com/<yourdomain>/sitemap.xml

We also offer a text only sitemap file that is essentially a list of URL's on your site.  The link to that file looks like this:

http://www.yakjive.com/<yourdomain>/sitemap.txt

The term syndication refers to the ability of a website to publish content in a variety of open formats that are readable by other services.  Syndication is a mechanism for distribution.

Syndication is generally accomplished by turning your content into a file format, often in a particular dialect of XML, that various readers of that format can read.  This gives other web users who use those readers one more way to access your content.

Currently, YakJive.com offers RSS 2.0 as it's standard for one such syndication format.  Every Newspage in your site has an RSS 2.0 feed that you may see a link for right above the Page Contents on the Newspage.  We have adopted the standard of including the newest five articles and the first 100 characters from each article in the RSS feed.

Down the road we also plan to offer ATOM and other formats for addtional syndication types, giving the webmaster the ability to turn on and off the syndication types, as desired.

Users may ask you why they can or can't do various things in the site. As with many parts of YakJive.com, user permissions are customizable. We have provided some basic user types to quickly assign more or less control to a user, but feel free to tailor users' permissions as you desire.