Electronic Groupware Newspaper and Blogs

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Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:13:00 MST

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KML and Google Maps

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:41:00 MST

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 ev...

FRAPPR maps on YakJive

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:35:00 MST

Frappr is a map-based social networking tool. It's easy to add a Frappr map to your YakJive site, like this: Just visit Frappr and follow their directions to create a new map once you've created an account. You can do that by becoming one of my buddies using the map above...

GeoRSS - Location and Syndication Feeds

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:21:00 MST

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 prese...

RSS - Really Simply Syndication

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:17:00 MST

On many pages of your YakJive site, you'll see either a link to "RSS 2.0" or a small icon that says "RSS @ YakJive." What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (amongst other things) and is a simple technology used to advertise condensed versions of your site's latest content out to the world. There are many RSS readers that can allow people to subscribe to your RSS 'feed,' view the items in your RSS, and then link back to your website. YakJive has...

Site Setup Wizard

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:09:00 MST

I'll be really interested to see if any new users take advantage of the site setup wizard. If a user approaches YakJive wanting to write about someting... it shouldn't get much easier to set up a site and get going. Now on to make more cool styles!...

Add a Weather Map from WeatherBonk.Com

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:35:00 MST

I just found a cool site called WeatherBonk that allows you to embed a map in a webpage showing the temperature at any location. Pretty cool ...

Love the new features

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:54:00 MST

I love the new features on the site. The abilities to click on the public website to add an article and to password-restrict pages greatly expands the use of YakJive. If anyone tests them out and has any problems, let us know. We're trying to make sure that the new features are well integrated with our security model, but there are sure to be some permutations that escaped us....

Public interface toolbars

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:41:00 MST

Your generated public website now has a special feature that checks to see if you are currently logged into the site. If so, YakJive will check your permissions and show special toolbars on your website that will not appear to anyone on the web except you! These toolbars will allow you to do some of the following things depending on the rules set for your logged-in user: Logout, clearing all authentication information Access the administration interface Publish the website ...

Password Protected Sections

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 15:34:00 MST

Sections of your site can now be designated as password protected so that you can limit who can access parts of your site. That means that you can now add users to your site who are readers of restricted sections, but who have no ability to edit or add articles to the newspages on those sections. What can you do with password protected sections? Store private journal or diary information Use a password protected section as a staging area for articles before official publication ...

Google Maps Directory

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:02:00 MST

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....

Accessibility: YakJive Generated Websites

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:58:00 MST

YakJive generated websites have a variety of features intended to make them more friendly to users with text-only web browsers, including: ALT and TITLE text on links and images Skip-to links in web pages Light-weight, 95% HTML web pages Consistent text-based page navigation We are doing our best to make all aspects of YakJive sites available to the entire Web-using public....

More on accessibility

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:51:00 MST

I rolled in some changes today so that most images and links should have ALT and TITLE text. Also, text-only browser users will notice that every YakJive site now has "skip to" links at the top of each page. If anyone has any further suggestions for us, please let us know. Unfortunately, much of the admin site is still not completely text-only browser friendly. We'll be working on that as soon as we can. We are also still working on making the restricted entry part of YakJive site...

YakJive and Accessibility

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:54:00 MST

I attended a talk today on making websites more accessible. I've been interested in this topic for a while, not only because I want to help disabled users use YakJive websites, but also because many of the tips and tricks for making websites accessible are also good for search engine optimization. After the talk, I downloaded the Lynx browser and looked at the YakJive homepage and some of the YakJive sample sites. I'm happy to say that the generated YakJive sites are not too bad on Ly...

Ecard or Electronic Greeting Card

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:26:00 MST

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

Map

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:25:00 MST

Map's, in the YakJive dictionary, are two-dimensional representations of the Earth's surfaceshowing the location of any ofyour articles that have coordinate info!...

Anti-spam Devices

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 22:42:00 MST

Indeed, after some heinous, profane spam, we've implemented some tools that will hopefully help us to reduce the ability of spammers to put spurious comments and guestbook submissions on your site. That's why you'll see that your visitors will now have their math skills tested when they try to submit a comment. Please note that we will do all we can to prevent spam submissions to your website, but we can't rule them all out. If you have any complaints or problems, let us know....

Amateur, but not Amateurish

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:36:00 MST

For those checking us out for the first time, it's important to understand that this is a homegrown, amateur attempt at a new type of blogging service. Does that mean that everything here is amateurish? No. Indeed, we hope that you'll find that because of our experience and backgrounds, that some of it is quite advanced. On the other hand, what it does mean is that we can use all the feedback we can get to make this site a great tool to use to publish your content to the web. Do you h...

Add an address and map your article

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 23:07:00 MST

You've possibly noticed before that you can enter address information for an article. Well how nice it would be if that address could be translated into a coordinate so that you could show the article's location on a map. Well, now YakJive does that automatically for you! To get this to work, simply enter an address, save the article, and republish your site. When you view the article, you'll see that, if the address was accurately entered, the article now has a coordinate and you...

Maps on Yakjive!

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 16:44:00 MST

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 ...

How do you get coordinates for articles?

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 16:40:00 MST

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...

Free Electronic Greeting Cards for Every Site

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:05:00 MST

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...

Paste Plain Text into Text Editor

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:25:00 MST

We've tried to do our best to give you the best, most function rich text editor out there, but even there you may sometimes encounter problems. Of the biggest problems seems to occur when pasting text copied from Word or an HTML page into the editor. Surprise... the text retains the fonts and styles from the original! You may find in this case that it's really painful to try to reformat the text to match they style of your site. Try this instead: The next time you are in the text ed...

Add a Yahoo Stock Tracking Widget

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 09:26:00 MST

The things you can do on the web now will blow you away. You can now add a Yahoo stock tracking widget like the one below. Just visit Yahoo's finance area, enter your stocks after you sign in, and paste the code they give you into the article edit box. Note that you have to paste the code into the HTML Source... so be sure to click the Source button on the editor. ...

Page breaks: How to format articles for printing

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:49:00 MST

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 form...

Can you give me help with HTML or CSS?

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:12:00 MST

Unfortunately, we don't have a ton of time to help out with HTML and CSS for you site.However, we will give you some tips to get started. One thing to keep in mind is that you need very little HTML knowledgeto work with YakJive.com. If you figure out how to read HTML, that should be good enough. Perhaps themost important items in the HTML elements in our pages are the attributes of the elements that allow you to control the styles. There are generally four parts of the element that will a...

Syndication

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:56:00 MST

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 standar...

Welcome to YakJive.com

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:53:00 MST

Have you ever had a project in mind for years?In your mind, you mightslowly 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'ma techie. Sort of. I'm one of those techno-phobe techies who really just wants to get ...

Storage: Why does my new site already use half a megabyte?

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 10:10:00 MST

Your website and account at YakJive.com includes scripts, html, and database tables right from the start that allow you to start adding content and generating your website. Without those files, your site would not function. As you add content, you'll see your space usage grow. Be aware that images can suck up a ton of space that you might prefer to use for content....

Blog Announce Service

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:20:00 MST

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: ...

RSS

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:54:00 MST

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...

HTML

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:22:00 MST

HTML, or the HyperText Markup Language, isone of the tools thatyou 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 knowHTML 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:...

Layout Editor

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:16:00 MST

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....

Searching articles on a site

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 20:10:00 MST

YakJive has it's own search capability that's pretty cool. Searching is based on simple word combinations and switches. For example, you can search for 'Santa Claus' and force the search to be case sensitive. In that case, an article with 'santa claus' will not be found. As the number of articles in your site grows, your users will find the Search capability more and more useful. It does have some tricks to get the most out of it. By default, the search tool will se...

How do I change my About, Legal, and Contact pages?

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:55:00 MST

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: From the wizard page, click on manage your site Click on properties Click on info pages 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 p...

And then there is search engine submission

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 14:59:00 MST

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...

Search Engines: Do I have to verify my website for Google to see my sitemap?

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 07:41:00 MST

No. Google only requires that you verify your sitemap if you wish to see site statistics. We include your sitemap in our YakJive.com sitemap archive file that we submit to Google and you may separately submit your sitmap URL to Google and it will be crawled (indexed by Google)according to their rules. In the near future, we hope to give you the ability to verify your website for Google so that you may view your site's statistics in their tool set. We'll let you know!...

What do you mean by 'groupware?'

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 21:12:00 MST

Have you wanted to create a blog, but not been sure that you would have the time or energy to add articles to the blog on a regular basis? The YakJive service is groupware. That means that after you sign up for an account, you can invite friends to use your account to add articles to your site! So even if you only add one article a month, if you can get five friends who share your interests to add one article each a month, by the end of the year that's 72 articles! Along the way, if your fr...

How can I build my own website using YakJive?

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 21:00:00 MST

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 c...

Sitemap

Fri, 26 May 2006 11:00:00 MST

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//sitemap.xml We also offer a text only sitemap ...

Search Engines: What's a sitemap?

Fri, 26 May 2006 10:49:00 MST

One of the many free features of your YakJive site is an autogenerated Google sitemap and a separate sitemap.txt file that can be used by some other search engines. Sitemaps are formatted text files that live in the root directory of your site (http://www.yakjive.com/yourdomain/). These files tell search engines which pages on your site to search. The URL to your Google sitemap should look like: http://www.yakjive.com//sitemap.xml The URL to your sitemap.txt file is...

Content Management

Mon, 22 May 2006 22:00:00 MST

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 interfac...

Why did my uploaded image shrink?

Mon, 15 May 2006 22:09:00 MST

YakJive is happy to give you lots of free space, but we also want to help you keep as much of that space for articles as possible. If images are larger than the maximum size allowed for your type of site, then we'll automatically shrink them to fit. That way, your image is still displayed, but it also conforms to our space requirements. In some rare cases, some line art and other types of images may not look as good as the large size image. In those cases, it's preferable that you res...

Can I point www.mydomain.com at my YakJive account?

Fri, 12 May 2006 16:41:00 MST

Absolutely. The best way to do this is to use a service like GoDaddy.com, a great low cost domain provider that also provides a bunch of cool features like something called Domain Masking. Domain Masking is the technical term describing the ability of a domain registrar, like GoDaddy, to be able to interpret requests for your domain name, point them at another site, but filter the web URL so that your visitors only see your domain, such as www.mydomain.com. If you're actually interested in ...

HTML: Why can't I put object tags in my HTML?

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 14:27:00 MST

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!...

Section

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:40:00 MST

Sections group Newspages into broad categories of related content. A "Gardening" Section may have a Newspage, or series of articles, on xeriscaping, another on perennials, and another column that is the webmaster's personal blog, that happens to be mostly gardening-related. 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 ...

CSS or "Style Sheets"

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:35:00 MST

Cascading Style Sheets drive the look-and-feel of YakJive.com sites. Generally, a medium complexity web user will know what CSS' are, but may not know how to modify them. HTML is the content of the web page, CSS determines the way it looks. 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!...

Blog

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:32:00 MST

Blogs, or "weblogs," are websites where web users may contribute their own opinions or comment to the web. Most blog pages are linear and sequential by date, as well as limited to contribution by one user only. YakJive.com expands upon the idea of the weblog to provide a group-based blog service wherein content can be organized to improve access and consistency of blog information....

Admin Console

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:29:00 MST

The Admin Console is the interface that webmasters and other registered users of YakJive.com sites use to build content and design for their sites....

User

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:28:00 MST

A registered user of your site is someone whom you have designated to be a contributor to the content of your site. When you create a new user through the administration console, that user is created with basic permissions that allow them to contribute to their blog and other articles that you have set up. New users use the same login URL that you use to log in, with a different username and password. Users may ask you why they can or can't do various things in the site. As with many part...

Newspage

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:18:00 MST

Newspages are similar to weekly columns or interest pieces in a newspaper. If you compiled all of the "Eating Downtown" columns from a year in your local newspaper, made them searchable, and allowed users to comment on them, you'd have something that looked like a single Newspage on YakJive.com. 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 Newspa...

Article

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:14:00 MST

An article is a single contribution of content by a user in a particular subject area. On YakJive.com, this effectively means that an article is a single item within a newspage. Examples of articles that a YakJive.com user might write would be recipes, technical tips, hobby info, a story chapter, or a day in a travelogue....

Permissions: What if I don't want user X to do Y?

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 05:13:00 MST

If you don't want one of your users to perform an action on the site, go to the "manage users" page and click on "rules" next to a user. You'll notice a list of rules like "eat.mashed" and "eat.mashed.potatoes" on the left. If you don't want the user to eat mashed peas, but you don't mind if the user eats mashed potatoes, then delete the rule "eat.mashed" and add a rule "eat.mashed.potatotes". How is this useful? Let's say yo...

Yaks: What is this about yaks?

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 00:00:00 MST

The domain YakJive.com came out of a long search spent combing a domain registry for names available that were related to communication, speech, chatting... you get the picture. "Yak," alternate spelling "Yack," and "Jive" were two of those possible words that came up, along with "poop," "scoop," and a whole lot more stuff that made even less sense. The slang approach seemed good, so yakin' and jivin' it was... but then... A Yak is Born When I mo...

What is this 'YakJive.com' name, anyway?

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 17:41:00 MST

'YajJive.com' is one of a possible several names that we thought of for our new business. So far, friend reaction has picked that above several others. However, if you don't want your site name to be something like www.yakjive.com/MySite, we are going to be making several domains available for your use, at least including the following list: www.newscommunity.org www.unpressedpress.com www.patchworkpages.com ...and possibly more if the fancy to buy more domain names strikes us. If ...

What type of site could I build with YakJive.com?

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 17:29:00 MST

You can build a site for just about anything you want with YakJive.com. For example: Family website Small business website Non-profit Organization Newspaper Local Government Newspaper Personal Newspaper Online travellogs Club/Group/Hobby Site Local commentary site Family Reunion Site Art/Writing portfolio site...

What's the point of YakJive.com?

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 MST

YakJive.com provides an interface for groups of people to manage shared content about their club, hobbies, family, community, and life in general. If you're looking for a static web page with a fixed set of content for a product or business, then YakJive.com may not be for you. But, if you're looking for an interface that allows you to easily add dynamic content to a website as your life, business, or family grow and change, then YakJive.com is for you. The YakJive.com administrative in...

How is YakJive.com different from BlogSpace, MySpace, etc.?

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 MST

YakJive.com is group-ware. Blog sites allow a single user to post a web page, add some content to a fixed set of 'windows' or 'blogs' on the page and they might allow you to change some styles. 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...

How is my site on YakJive.com like a newspaper?

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 MST

Just like a newspaper, YakJive.com allows you to group articles about things you want to write about into their own newspages and sections of related newspages. Just like the New York Times, you could create an online newspaper with YakJive.com that had Sports, Lifestyles, Politics, and Business sections, all linked to the main page of your choice. Of course, all the content is created by you, but YakJive.com hopes to offer a simple interface that allows you to focus on content without having ...

Who uses YakJive.com?

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 MST

YakJive.com has been created for any type of individual, group, organization, business, or even government agency who wants their own updatable online newspaper. We hope that some of the following types of users might find our service useful! Families - Create a family newspaper to keep in touch across the miles! Individuals - Create your own restaurant, movie, or book reviews, add photos, and style the site to fit your personality. Clubs - Does your fencing club need a newletter? How about you...