So, every person qualified to teach you how to build a website that gets to the top of Google reads your site (like this one)- and you want to make money off your site- add a job listing board!

Job-a-matic makes it easy to do. I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but Ernie Schenck, advertising grand master, decided to do it on his blog: using Job-a-matic.

Job-a-matic | Home
Make More from Your Site with Job-a-matic!
Add Paid Listings to
Your Site Today
Why Job-a-matic?* Sell your own job listings. You set the price.
* Earn additional revenue with paid listings from Simply Hired
* Wow your audience with useful content
* Watch the money roll in.

We’re not a big fan of guestbooks- but a client asked us about having one in WordPress. Right now, the WordPress world is in a tizzy over switching to 2.1 or continuing with 2.0- but here is one that claims to work with WordPress 2.1:

Alleba Blog » WordPress Guestbook Generator Plugin
Plugin Name: Guestbook Generator
Description: Generates a guestbook for WordPress blogs. Once activated, click on Options > Guestbook Generator.
Version: 0.8
Author: Andrew dela Serna
Notice: Compatible only with WordPress 2.1. Support for older versions will continue but updates/upgrades will be focused on the newest versions of WordPress. Scroll down to download Version 0.7 which is designed for Wordress 2.0.X.

Features:

1. No files to edit. Just upload the plugin, activate it then run the generator.
2. Guestbook template seamlessly integrates with your current theme.
3. When changing themes, simply run the generator to create the necessary files.
4. Like a true-blue guestbook, entries are arranged from newest to oldest.
5. Remember the time when guestbooks were the “in” thing? Hopefully this plugin will bring back the ol’ days. Hehe.

I don’t share the authors romantic view of guestbooks- for the most part, I find them silly. Comments are just as effective- and when using the amazing “subscribe to comments” plugin, you can actually carry on a great conversation on your site.

Please note- a lot of themes are behaving badly with WordPress 2.1 right now- so it may not be your plugin that’s broken- it may be the theme. It’s a trial and error world for a bit. If in doubt, stick with WordPress 2.0 if you aren’t ready to invest some time in the upgrade. Always remember to back up your complete database- and all files, before making a change.

It’s official, it’s on time- and it may confuse a lot of people.

It’s WordPress 2.1 and we’ve already launched one site using the new “static front page” system. Although this was possible with some hacks- it’s now an official feature- and a sort of nod back to a Web 1.5 world. The idea of a “static” front page is based on the idea that people will actually come to your URL based on something other than search- and are too stupid to look around a bit.

80% of your hits will come from search- and 40% of the people who know your URL will still type it into a search bar- so, the likelihood of them actually seeing your front page is very low.

Before you jump into the 2.1 world, make sure you do a complete backup of your site, theme and database- it does some things very different than 2.0. Some plugins will break- research each one that you consider key before taking the plunge. And even thought the developers are now announcing the next version will be released on April 23rd- be aware, the 2.0 codebase will be maintained until 2010.

The biggest changes (besides the static front page option) are the built in spell check, the new image handling tools (which have been seen on WordPress.com for quite a while), and the easy ability to switch between code and WYSIWG in the edit window.

How the new page configuration will work with RSS- and Google visibility will have to be looked at. For now, we’re moving slowly at switching sites over. We will have more info as time goes by. Here are the official users side changes from the DevBlog:
Development Blog › WordPress 2.1 Ella

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Feel free to share your 2.1 experiences in the comments on this post.