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I was lucky enough to get a pre-public release copy of busin3ss and vvk’s [YACG] Mass Installer.

Wow, what a beautiful piece of software.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For those of you that don’t know, YACG is an acronym for ‘Yet Another Content Generator’. It’s a fun piece of software that is the logical successor to myGen and RSSGM before that…not to mention that it’s open source with a supportive community behind it. What it does exactly is build sites…you feed it keywords, customize templates, find content sources, etcetera, and it’ll put together a nice site for you in a fraction of the time it’d normally take for development.
This is where it gets interesting. Let’s just say that it still can be relatively time consuming to collect keywords, and to customize those templates (or build new ones) and find articles or other usable content…especially when you’re in the business of building a ton of websites in a short period of time.

Now, this is where the [YACG] Mass Installer comes into play. More on that in a sec, though.

[YACG] Mass Installer is a top-notch bit of software. It’s sleek, it’s pretty, it’s AJAXified. If you’re mass installing anything, this is the interface you want to be using. The people behind the scenes (busin3ss and vvk) are both down-to-earth good guys and have proven with YACG that they know their stuff.

This is all well and good, you might say, but what can [YACG] Mass Installer do for me?

I’ll go through a quick rundown: it can harvest keywords from YSM and WordTracker and pull keyword statistics through Google’s Adwords tools (this feature alone works better than most paid desktop keyword tools…obviously though, free keywords from YSM and WordTracker won’t shine a light on paid keyword sources such as Wordze). When you’re done harvesting keyword lists, you can harvest templates. That’s right…I said templates. Just point the software at almost any website out there and it’ll return a usable template based on that website…I’ve yet to see any app do what this puppy does, very novel, very cool.

So from there, you have keywords and templates, what else can it do? Well, as the title implies, it Mass Installs YACG. Imagine that! It’ll do your normal job of putting the YACG core files, template files, keyword files etc, exactly where they need to be, as well as removing certain footprints–like having a keywords.txt file located in your base directory.

Are you convinced yet? Since, I really just gave a cursory overview, here is their screencast which’ll give a whole lot more information than I was able to: http://yacgmassinstaller.com/screencast/.

Since it’s a new piece of software, it’s a given that there will be bugs. This is yet another place where [YACG] Mass Installer has excelled. That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s bugs, as it does. However, since reporting them yesterday and today, both busin3ss and vvk have been hard at work to fix them, even on the eve of their public launch. Dedication to customer service will obviously not fail, here.

Anyway, to sum things up, behind the slick exterior lies a virtual YACG powerhouse…if you build YACG sites, get this now (that’s two thumbs up from me).