YakJive FAQ

So you're asking yourself... did I read that right?

Yes! You did. We're now offering free electronic greeting cards for every site. Simply upload an image for an article, publish your website, then visit your public website. You should see a small mail icon below the image in your article. Click on that and you should be taken to the greeting card wizard. Fill in the info and send away!

We are still working on the styles a bit and hope to have those figured out in a few days. In the meantime, send away!

We happen to be geospatial hobbyists at YakJive. We've watched the industry and added the ability to plot your articles on maps, automatically geocode addresses, and even allow you to assign icons to your newspages.

Now, we've also added your article coordinates to your RSS feeds. This means that any tool that can read GeoRSS and plot it on a map can plot your articles on their maps, too!

See a YakJive site on the ACME GeoRSS Reader here.

How cool is that? In the increasing presence of spatial search and context on the Web, now people can have the opportunity to find your articles by their spatial position in addition to their content!

Check out this page's feed on the ACME GeoRSS Reader.

YakJive has been added to the Google Maps Directory.  Those folks are trying to become a one-stop-shop for a variety of mashups that use Google Maps, such as YakJive!

We wish them luck.

The coolest thing about YakJive.com is that when you sign up and add content, you automatically get a website!

Try it out!  Sign up, follow the instructions in the welcome email that is sent to you, then login to your site's administrative interface and push the publish button.  You should then be able to immediately go to your website address and see the simple site that is generated with a single welcome article.  (Hint: click on Milo's picture in the upper left on the administrative console and you'll be taken to your website.)

For your convenience, we provide 'About,' 'Legal,' and 'Contact' pages out of the box.  They are simple pages that appear in the top level of your menu, and you can even hide them if you want.

To change the text in the pages, follow these steps:

1. From the wizard page, click on manage your site
2. Click on properties
3. Click on info pages
4. Simply type into the Page content box on each section to change the content of each page.  HTML is allowed to make the text a bit prettier.

From there, simply save, then publish your site and you should see the changes on your website.

Now that YakJive integrates with Google Maps, it's fun to try to add travellogs, hurricane tracks, trip journals... just about anything that can be plotted on a map. The hardest thing is... where do you get the coordinates?

If you're hiking around the countryside, you may be stuck and have to use a GPS unit to get the longitude and latitude points (in decimal degrees) that you'll need for your articles. However, if you're doing a travellog or place journal, try typing the city, country and the phrase "decimal degrees" into Google or one of the other search engines. you'll be surprised how often a result comes up with the coordinates for that place.

Updated 9/7/06... NEW COORDINATE PICKER!

Now we've added a tool to allow you to select the coordinates for your article right from a mapping interface. You should see a small map icon next to the longitude and latitude boxes in the add/edit article interface. Simply click on that to zoom in, pan around, and select a point for your article!

(Please note that although we are using the free Google Maps service, our site is not endorsed in any way by Google.)

YakJive.com offers the ability to create a group-focused dynamic site with content organized how you want it, where you want it. Every member of the site can be all powerful and edit/change anything they want, or the site creator can arrange a hierarchy of administrators, superusers, and users who each have different abilities and responsibilities when contributing to the site.

Think of YakJive.com as your way to create a newspaper about whatever you want, updated whenever you want to update it.

For security purposes, we are forced to restrict some tags from HTML that you submit to the site. We're sorry, but we can't allow anything that can possibly degrade server performance, violate our hosting services security policies, or adversely affect the page HTML. Ugly styles are one thing, but premature termination of your page is another... and not one that you would probably want!

KML files are the "Keyhole Markup Language" files originally created by the Google Keyhole team to serve data to Google Earth. Recently, Google added the ability to automatically map KML (and GeoRSS) files in Google Maps, so of course we added the functionality here.

Here are some things you can do with KML:

• Plot bike, hiking, or other off road routes you collect with your GPS
• Plot travel locations and trips
• Plot points of interest to you and your fans
• Plot every where your dog has gone this year

If you have a handheld GPS unit, we highly recommend this free tool to convert your files to KML: GPSBabel

Try it below! (You'll have to zoom out to see the blackbird points.)

YakJive is now integrated with Google maps so that anyone who signs up, adds articles to a site, and adds coordinates to those articles, can allow their site viewers to plot their articles on a map. We offer the ability to plot single articles, to plot all the articles in a newspage, or to plot all the articles as a route. So if you've taken a trip through Africa and post an article per city in order of the dates that you traveled, you'll see a route of your trip!

Coordinates need to be in decimal degrees for the mapping tool to work.

Coming soon... automatic address geocoding...

You may have noticed several things if you try to print out one of the pages on your website.  For starters, you'll see that the menus don't print out.  We have intentionally removed those from the print styles so that your users don't waste paper or page space.  Also, you'll occasionally notice that long articles will run over into more than one page and may even be cut off.

Using the rich text editor when you add or edit articles, there's an easy way to insert page formatting in your printed page that will help you control where pages get broken.  In the middle tool bar in the editor, the next-to-last button allows you to insert a page break anywhere in your article.  Experiment with it and see how well it works for you.  Page breaks will not affect the onscreen view of your website.

As you play with adding content to your site, you'll notice that adding more articles or changing the content of an article may change your printed page layout somewhat.  HTML, the source language for coding webpages, is great for formatting content for the screen, but not always ideal when also combined with printed media.  We do our best to provide you with a style for printing that is sparse and clean, but you may have to experiment to get things to come out exactly the way you like.

(Hint: Try a print preview on this page and you should see that this article is broken up into several pages by hidden page breaks.  The best part is that they don't impact the onscreen view!)