DarrenBarefoot.com

Avoiding more pressing matters since 2020

Posted on by

Boring Site Polls: The Link List and a Job Board?

Due to my own busyness and ambivalence, this site’s redesign is moving at a glacial pace. However, it is happening.

In the spirit of revamping things around here, I’m considering dispensing with my links page. Despite what the page claims, it is no longer an accurate representation of what I read. I used to use Bloglines, and I shared my public feeds on that page. That’s no longer straightforward, because I use a variety of aggregating and filtering services (most notably, AideRSS) to mash and morph the feeds to which I subscribe. Plus, I switched to Google Reader a while back.

As a result, my blogroll is littered with old sites I don’t read, defunct sites and inaccurate links. I’m very bad at maintaining it because it’s a chore, and always at the mucky bottom of a long, long list of tasks.

So, should the old blogroll stay or go? I could discuss the pros and cons of killing it, but Rebecca recently did a good job of considering the issue. Looking at my site stats, it ranks #68 in popularity over the past two years. Do you ever use my links page? What do you do on your site? Should I keep the thing? Here’s a poll:

http://s3.polldaddy.com/p/836314.js Should I keep my Links page?
( surveys)

Adding a Job Board?

I receive an email mentioning a job in the Vancouver technology or marketing industries at least two or three times a month. Depending on my inclination and busyness, I occasionally post these to my site. I thought it might be useful to include a job board page on the site where all of these jobs could live.

Somebody recently pointed me at Job Thread, which displays local jobs specific to the industries I specify in a widget. Somewhat like Google AdSense, you earn money “based on a number of factors including the quantity and quality of traffic your Widget generates”. I ought to reject them for the needless capitalization of ‘widget’, but never mind that. That’s not quite the right thing, because I don’t see a seamless way for people to submit jobs that would ensure they appeared on my site. Plus, I want something more robust than just a widget.

Ideally, I’d like a system where anybody can submit a job listing, which would be held in moderation until I approved it. Then it would be posted to a page, and eventually retired to an archive after a couple of months. I imagine one could hack something together with WordPress, but does anybody know of any ready-made solutions? Plus, you know, if there’s a money-generating angle, I wouldn’t complain. I’d do it out of the goodness of my heart, but I’m not going to turn down a little passive revenue. Any advice?

11 comments

  1. I’ve heard of a few plug-ins, themes etc. related to job boards but not tried any myself. This one might be useful if the price isn’t a barrier:
    http://www.dailywp.com/jobpress-wordpress-theme/

    Definitely you could hack something together with plugins like Flutter, Role Manager, etc. but that’s probably more time consuming than it’s worth given the aforementioned busyness 🙂

  2. There are a variety of job sites that have mini sites (e.g. jobs.darrenbarefoot.com) with various bits of integration. I’ve gotten halfway through doing this a number of times, but it always got too fiddly.

    So, yes, ideally *I’d* like to see this too. Somebody do some research and get back to Darren and myself, please 😛

    Google Reader lets you embed feeds. It recently decided to start displaying my ridiculously long list of sites tagged with blogroll … which I don’t keep updated 😛 See http://bmannconsulting.com/blogroll

  3. I think it would be great to see you either add a job board (RSS-capabale?).

    If you want to keep your blogroll more up to date, I suggest using Top Links (http://friendsroll.com/).
    It is a WordPress-plugin that shows which blogs/websites you link to the most often.

  4. I had changed my blog links page to a more of a “recommended” links page. More reliable than bloggers and more resource-oriented and community oriented than my blog list in Google Reader. Different purpose, less demanding, though blogs can fit into it in a category. This is more like some of my bookmarks, but in an accessible place where I can always find them. Some dynamic, some not so much:

    http://www.davingreenwell.com/recommended.php

  5. Hi Darren,

    I won’t vote, since I’m a bit biased. 🙂

    One thing we’re working on, which you may find straddles the question nicely, is a new, “thematic” version of our widget. So while the current widget displays the best of your own site’s content, the new version will allow you to display either that or the best of content from feeds of your choice.

    I can keep you in the loop when that’s ready for prime time if you’d be interested in poking at it.

  6. I’ve been toying with some of the same issues re blogroll. I still use Bloglines which I embedded in my sidebar. I now have just a subset of those on my main page and have created two new pages for different sub-rolls (Marketing and Virtual Worlds).

    I don’t know if this is a good solution, but I do believe that new blog readers – especially those who haven’t gotten the hang of RSS value having a small set of “recommended links”.

    For the job board – we do it manually at OneDegree. Ugh. I wish we had a better solution too.

  11. Rather than posting here and there, I though I would list some of sites who offer jobs in Marketing industry, If you have experience with good web site who offer such marketing jobs and they are not listed here, please let us know.

    MarketingJobs.com
    Hotjobs.yahoo.com
    Talentzoo
    Jobs.Net
    MarketingCrossing.com
    CareerBuilder.com

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this: