ultimate geek girl

Blog contests are a great way to get some FREE exposure for your blog or website, but if you enter the Ultimate Geek Girl’s Blog Contest, you could win some great blogging related prizes!

And as a bonus, you’ll receive some extra traffic to your blog and potentially new readers!

If you’re interested, read on for details.

There will be five (5) prizes awarded to the winners who will be randomly drawn. All winners will be announced on the blog in a post and the sidebar, plus ALL participants will be acknowledged for their participation in a roundup post for the contest!

There is some evidence that the more plugins you use on your WordPress installation, the slower your website will load.

So, ditch some of those plugins and use these three WordPress hacks to get the same functionality and at the same time improve your page load time!

First up is Gravatar, the globaly reconized avatar that ‘follows’ you no matter where you go online. Yes, there are WordPress plugins available that make adding Gravtars oh so simple, but be adventurous and set up Gravatars on our own!

To begin, navigate to Design > Theme Editor > comments.php

Last week, I added the PingCrawl plugin to my WordPress installation. Ah, it was interesting, to say the least. I saw the load time for posts increase dramatically, and even getting my WordPress administration screen to load in a timely fashion was difficult.

I even asked you guys, the readers to read my article, Automatically Add Links to Related Sites, and vote in a poll about PingCrawl.

The participation wasn’t that high, BUT, even I could see that my servers cannot handle the power of the great PingCrawl!

I just got started with twitter a week or two ago, and so far, I have found dozens of programs, browser add-ons and website applications that are helpful to Twitter users around the world.

Perhaps a much-needed one is tweetSMS, which is back for international users who want to use SMS messaging for Direct Messages from other Twitter users.

The pricing of tweetSMS looks pretty reasonable, but I can imagine for many tweeters, they won’t need this service - but if you are not near a computer and want to make SURE you get Direct Messages, check out tweetSMS and get 15 free credits just for signing up!

Searching for related posts can be tedious and time consuming. The PingCrawl plugin seeks to take away some of the frustration of adding related posts by other bloggers to the end of your new posts.

The author of the plugin says that he gets about an 80% success rate of approved pings - so that’s not bad for a day’s work of blogging!

PingCrawl does inject its own link every 10 or so links, so visit ANTY.INFO to learn how to remove the code if you want to.

Google Knol is Google’s attempt to break into user-created content. It has similarities to Wikipedia and About.com, but it also takes a turn into social networking and collaboration by promoting the author of a knol prominently in the sidebar.

A knol by definition is a “unit of knowledge.” So, Google Knol is a collection of articles (called knols) on a myriad of topics - but at current, many of the knols cover medical topics (boring!).

However, there are a few really neat and helpful knols available, including my favorites: