Kaliya Hamlin is organizing an (un)conference, She’s Geeky.

The goals of the event are to:

• Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology.
• Discuss topics about women and technology.
• Connect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields.

To find out find out more, read Kaliya’s blog entry for more details.

I was asked by Tatiana Apandi, an Associate Editor at O’Reilly and the creator of Women in Technology series, to write about my career, experinces, and thoughts on technology. I decided to focus on encouraging women to be a part of influencing the future. I talk about the importance of women role models in changing the geek stereotype that the girls in our society are exposed to.

There are a lot of great and interesting women who are participating in this series. I think it is important to highlight and showcase what women are doing in technology and how they are impacting the technology industry. These women are great role models.

There are a number of ways to keep up to date with the latest blog posts on Webgrrls.com. You can subscribe to RSS feeds via an aggregator or via email.

What is RSS?

RSS is a technology that is being used by web users to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to. When you subscirbe to an RSS feed, you basically tell the RSS Reader to let you know every time the website you subscribed to is updated.

How to Use RSS

The first thing you need to do is Get an RSS Reader. There are many feed readers with a variety of features. The ones that I use are

Continue Reading “How to subscribe to RSS Feeds”

A blog that has it’s own domain name projects a level of seriousness and professionalism.

You should have your own domain even if you are on a hosted solution like typepad or blogger. To do that you can implement a feature called Domain Mapping. Which is the process of pointing a registered domain name to a TypePad or a Blogger blog.

Below is a step by step tutorial on how to map your domain to your blog host.

Continue Reading “How to Create a Domain Mapping for Typepad and Blogger blogs”

Plug-ins to Increase Page Views of Your Blog

Related Posts plug-in increases page views and influences your reader to stay longer on your blog. The users are already reading something on your site that is of interest to them, you can influence them to stay longer by offering content on similar topics.

Top Postings plug-in showcases to newcomers your blog’s most popular blog posts to hopefully get the reader interested in your classic posts and prevent them from leaving your site.

A Site Map of your blog provides a Table of Contents of all of your blog posts so users can scan all of your posts easily. If they can find something interesting to read quickly, they will probably stay on your site longer.

Plug-ins to help Build a Community on Your Blog

To build a community, you have to let users comment without registering and because Spam is the biggest concern when it comes to not moderating comments, you should install the following Anti-Spam plug-ins: Akismet, Math, and Captcha.

Subscribe to comments plug-in allows a commenter to get e-mail notifications when new comments are posted. This encourages commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

To encourage people to comment, you can install Top Commenters plug-in. You can showcase and highlight the people who most frequently comment on your blog, creating a sense of community.

Plug-ins to Increase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of Your Blog

All in one SEO pack plug-in modifies your blog title so it becomes more search engine friendly and allow you to add meta keywords to your posts, another technique to get indexed on search engines.

Google Sitemaps plug-in creates a google compliant site map of your blog which will help google search engines index your blog better.

HitTail suggests the most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. When you start using their suggested keywords, you will boost the natural search results of your site.

Plug-ins to Help you with Editing Content on Your Blog

Polite-ifier plug-in removes bad language from your commentaries posts.

ST Visualize plug-in adds more advanced functionality to your blog’s visual editor in the admin area.

Plug-in to Print Blog Posts

The Print plug-in allows your readers to print your blog post

Plug-ins to Backup Your Blog

Backup your blog database with the WordPress Database Backup plug-in.

Plug-ins to View Reports of Your Blog

WordPress Reports plug-in displays charts of your Feedburner stats and Google Analytics stats from inside your WordPress admin panel.

More WordPress Plug-Ins for Your Blog

WordPress has a centralized plugin directory.