jacobmartin

Here’s the first of many updates to let the world know what I’ve been doing since I quit my job. (I’m not going to dwell on my decrease in alcohol consumption, my increase in excercise, or my decrease in junk food intake. Nor am I even going to mention the problems I’m having trying to quit smoking…)

First of all, a bit of history. Last March I was fortunate enough to be invited to the position of best man at my friend Peter Allen’s wedding. As anyone who’s been in the position of having to make a speech will know, it’s often rather difficult to source decent jokes on the internet these days. Not because there aren’t plenty out there, but because there aren’t any sites out there which let you search for them in ways that are meaningful. Even looking for decent jokes you can share with your friends over a few beers is more trouble than it’s worth.

This is a problem I’ve been working on solving and I am now please to launch what will become the internet’s biggest and best organised collection of jokes — jokii.com. Let me take a few moments of your time to explain how jokii stands apart from all those other joke websites out there:

• Tagging instead of categories
  The idea of putting jokes into a single category is fundamentally broken. What if you want a lawyer joke that is also about cars and computers? On your usual joke website the joke could be filed under any of three (or more!) categories and there’s no guarantee you’d be able to find it before you got bored of looking, even using a full text search. Using jokii, you have all the benefits of a full text search combined with the ability to browse through hundreds of tags giving extra information about the jokes. A joke containing the would “laptop” would be missed using a plain old joke website, but if jokii has that joke tagged with “computer” then you’ll find that computer joke you’re looking for whether it has the word “computer” in it or not.
• User participation
  Old-fashined joke websites tend to be run by one person. That is to say, only one person decides what content goes up on the site, when it is published and how it is organised. On today’s democratic internet this just won’t do, and so jokii allows anybody to sign up and contribute their own jokes to the database. More than this, registered users can tag any joke they like. In this way, people can share and organise the jokes that *they* think are funny, while helping to build an up-to-date, ever-changing resource that will benefit society at large. I don’t want to go into too much detail right now, but one of the two big updates planned for the very near future is a way to allow the community to vote on which jokes are funniest, so that the funniest jokes float to the top of the screen. No more wading through page after page of terrible puns. (Unless it’s terrible puns you’re looking for!)
• Super-smart search
  This is the other big thing coming real soon. Although this first version of jokii already has a great search engine and the ability to browse by tags, I am going to take this to the next level. Using jokii, you’ll find funny, relevant jokes you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you have a couple of ideas or words you’re wanting to turn into a joke then jokii will provide you with recipes that use the joke ingredients you have already selected to help you bake the gag that’ll have them all in stiches. No other joke website comes close to the playful discovery that jokii will allow.

This is the first time I’ve released something like this without spending a long time polishing it up, but I’ve come around to the idea of releasing early and updating often. I’d welcome any kind of feedback about the site as well as any feature suggestions you may have. Don’t be shy about telling me that something doesn’t work the way you’d expect it to, or that something really obvious seems to be missing.

Just promise me one thing. Don’t rib me over how rubbish the visual design looks right now. I’ve been concentrating on getting the basic functionality together and I swear I’ll make it look pretty as soon as I can! There are big improvements up ahead and my immediate priority is to get some sleep after the all-night 11-hour programming session I’ve just put myself through. Here’s to humour!

Two weeks ago I quit my job in finance for a local government body here in the UK. So, for the first time in a few years, I’m free to blog again. This blog will be about me and what I’m doing, but I’ll be setting up another blog for more whimsical, tangential musings on another of my sites.

You should make amends with you,
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live,
Why not try, and Make yourself?

– Make Yourself (Incubus)

I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of working for other people and I am now working for myself. I’ll be dropping some hints about what I’ve got in the pipeline some time in the future.