After taking an extended hiatus from Yakimbe to clear our slates of other projects and time-consuming activities, we are once again actively developing Yakimbe. We have a new focus, a new design to implement and many new features coming in the near future.

In fact, feel free to test out our latest (currently unadvertised) feature, RSS feeds. Add the latest or most active yakimbe headlines to your favorite reader here:

New posts: http://www.yakimbe.com/new.xml
Active posts: http://www.yakimbe.com/active.xml

Also, Yakimbe is now fully compatible with mobile smart phone devices, including Android, iPhone and iPad.

-Jesse

Yakimbe is a new concept – at least in the world of local news. If you’re familiar with Digg or Reddit, the things Yakimbe does will be very familiar to you. But, if you’re not sure what to do next, here’s a quick rundown:

Submitting is quick and easy

1. Submit something!

Yakimbe is not fed by rss feeds or any automated process, it relies on you to help others find the best news! Submitting is easy (just click submit in the top nav) and enter a headline and URL. The subhead field is optional and appears in a pop-up tooltip.

Vote on an item

2.Vote

Voting is even easier than submitting. Just click the arrows to the right of every submission!  Yakimbe orders items by tallying your votes (and doing a few other things). With out votes, the items on the active page stay the same. If you like an article (or comment) up-vote it! If you find an item that isn’t local news or just doesn’t belong, down-vote it.

There’s even more you can do on Yakimbe, check back tomorrow to learn more!

We got lots of new traffic today after our appearance on local internet radio station TalkLansing.net’s LansingNEXT show. We had so  much fun with hosts Dan Hogan and Julielyn Gibbons. If you haven’t caught their show, make sure you do. It airs every Wednesday at 11 a.m. and focuses on what’s hip and happening with issues that are important to Lansing’s next generation.

If you missed our show, or you just want to learn more about LansingNEXT, hop on over to their site at http://www.talklansing.net/lansingnext.

Interestingly, Lansing Noise just happened to be writing an article about LansingNEXT the same night we were on, so we may make a cameo appearance in Thursday’s issue! I’ll be sure to post a link of the article when I find it.

’till tomorrow, thank you Lansing, and happy reading!

-Jesse

Me and John are making a guest appearance today on LansingNEXT, a local internet radio talk show focused on Lansing’s next generation. You can catch the show at 11 a.m. at http://www.talklansing.net.

-Jesse

UPDATE: This problem is fixed, please ignore this post.

www.yakimbe.com is not working at the moment, please access the site here instead.

We’re having issues with our DNS right now. I won’t dive into details, but in short, www.yakimbe.com doesn’t go anywhere at the moment. A fix is in, but these changes take a little while to take effect. Hopefully we’ll be back to normal operations within the hour.

We apologize for the interruption.

-Jesse

Me and John will make a guest appearance tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. on Lansing’s new internet radio site, TalkLansing.net. The show, LansingNEXT, is hosted by Daniel J. Hogan and Julielyn Gibbons, and focuses on the events happening in our area that affect Lansing’s next generation.

Be sure to tune in (browse in?) Wednesday, March 24 at 11 a.m. to catch us! We’ll post links to a recording too, so if you miss it, check back!

-Jesse

Yakimbe is the proud new owner of a facebook page and a twitter stream. Follow us here, become a fan here.

We’ll be adding some RSS feeds shortly, hopefully this weekend, so keep an eye out for that. You can already subscribe to the feed for this blog to stay up on the latest developments, and of course we’ll be posting updates to twitter and facebook as well.

-Jesse

Yesterday we noticed an issue where voting after commenting on an item resulted in an error. In fixing that problem, we unintentionally introduced a new bug  that caused all voting to redirect strangely or cause an error, even though the vote was recorded.

We’ve since gotten a fix out there and all is working normally now. We apologize for the issue, and strongly encourage anyone that notices strange behavior to report it to us at webguy@yakimbe.com.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to develop Yakimbe and introduce new features to help you find the best news, events and conversation.

Happy reading!

-Jesse

Yakimbe is now open for anyone to join. With tonight’s release, we’ve removed the beta code previously needed to signup for an account and have moved to a status of open-beta. In it’s place you’ll find a reCaptcha field, which will check to make sure you’re not a bot AND use you to help translate old newspapers and books into searchable digital text.

Other new features include:

• Cleaned up styling for submission editing and editing history. Both features can now be found to the upper right of your submission, on the comments page
• Comment editing and edit history has been added
• New styles for our main navigation bar, making it actually look like a navigation bar.
• Links to stories now open in a new window.

We also made some changes that will hopefully make the site and tad faster.

Even though we are currently in open beta, please keep in mind that this is a project in progress! If you find anything out of place or working improperly, please let us know at webguy@yakibme.com. More features are in the pipeline, including a planned upgrade to our active page sorting algorithm.

Stay tuned, and watch for us in this weeks edition of Captial Gains!

-Jesse