This is a no brainer so I immediately signed up. Now I’m proud to say I’m on dreamhost, well not yet! I still need to finish my theme renovation before I move everything to the new host.

Oh, I acquired techiegirlonline.com domain with my dreamhost hosting so I’ll be using this when everything got settled.

Dreamhost control panel is different from the one I’m used to and probably everyone is used to, but uploading files is really easy. I got techiegirlonline.com up and running in less than a minute.

Happy Easter Everyone!!!

This blog has been earning from different sources, and adsense is just one of them. My Google Adsense story started last year, August, when I first join the program.

I almost gave up since I barely earn $2/month (huhuhu) for about 4 months. Good thing there are some bloggers who share their adsense experiences, some e-books to guide on how to optimize your adsense ads, Last December, I earned my first US$100!!!

It’s just December 30 when my Google PIN was mailed to me. I received it 23 days later.

So I really expected to receive my December and January earnings last Feb. 29, and luckily, the payment has been processed on that same day.

After office,I headed to MV Lhuiller MRT Ayala branch to try my luck since I only have a SSS id and my company ID.

Upon reaching the branch, the guard approached me and asked me about my transaction information. He asked me to present two IDs, so i gave the IDs that I have.

Well, the guard told me then that my company ID is not acceptable since they are just an agent of Western Union. He just advised me to directly go to any Western Union branch.

I then headed to RCPI branch in Taft avenue. The girl just asked me to fill up the remittance claim form someting, then asked for my ID. She just confirmed the transaction and gave me my money! Hassle free!!

I want to thank Marhgil, for sharing some of his keywords and sharing his SEO knowledge , Jehzeel for patiently answering my never ending text queries lol, also to Dexter for the Google Adsense Tips he shared

This is to officially announce that TechieGirl will be hosting its first blog carnival edition next year which is scheduled to be released on January 02, 2008. Topics are mainly about technology and any related topics and information.

What is a Blog Carnival

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.

Blog Carnival is the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and maintain carnivals.

Who creates a Blog Carnival?

It takes a village, you might say. Although it is possible for one person to do everything it takes to make a Blog Carnival, the work is usually divided up like this:

• The Organizer starts the carnival, decides what it will be about, what the submission criteria are, and how often it will appear. They also coordinate who will host each edition of the carnival. As time passes, they find new volunteers to host. Organizers use Blog Carnival to manage the schedule of who is hosting what and when, so they can present it to their audience in a single, well-known place.
• The Host volunteers to host a carnival edition on their blog. They work with the organizer to pick a date that suits them (popular carnivals schedule their hosts for months in advance). In the period leading up their scheduled date, they collect submissions from bloggers, and organize them into a single article chalk-full of links, often with their own comments. This article is published on the scheduled date, and everyone leaves comments on their blog telling them what a great job they did (well, usually, anyway).
• Bloggers who have written an article on the carnival’s topic can submit the link for inclusion in the next edition of the carnival. Often, bloggers who contribute to carnivals are experts in their field (or at least, highly opinionated!). Blog Carnival has a carnival submission form for each carnival that bloggers can use to submit links to selected posts to a carnival host. All the blogger needs to know is the name of the carnival, and Blog Carnival takes care of getting it to the right person.
• The Audience consists of both bloggers and just-plain-interested readers. They come to Blog Carnival to find out if there is a carnival on a topic they are interested in, and to find out where the carnival editions have been, and where they’re going to be in the future.

Submission is easy but if you need more information on how to submit your entries, please visit the Blog Carnival FAQ

SUBMIT YOUR ENTRIES HERE

—————
The web hosting jobs are readily available these days. They are looking for people who are able to do the best web hosting. Always choose a web host who is responsible and has some experience regarding this issue. There are many cheap hosting site kinds just like one known as lunarpages. One more such example is hostmonster. One more such company that offers affordable website hosting with free domain names is known as startlogic.

When I had decided to take blogging seriously late September 2007, One major concern that I had dealt with was choosing which web hosting company to host my blog. Of course as a beginner back then, I looked for companies that offer reliable Cheap Web hosting.

3ix Cheap Web hosting experience

• Offers Cheap Web Hosting! As a newbie in the blogosphere, I don’t want to spend much on my hosting plan as of that time. So with a $1 per month , I can’t help but sign up to their plan.
• They offer a 30day money back guarantee, no questions ask.
• LIVE customer support, real person, not a robot lol
• Fast activation. Upon payment, my account is activated instantly. Even the upgrade takes no waiting time after my payment has been made.

I was initially subscribed to the EXCITE plan and just today, upgraded to EXTRA plan. Based on my experience with them, though considered short, you can consider 3ix as a starter cheap web hosting service for your blog.

As for reliability, up and downtimes, all I can say is, you’ll get what you pay for.

There are several companies out there that offers cheap web hosting, will update this blog if ever I get a reliable feedback.

In order for you to get paid for blogging, all you have to do is to post your opinions on certain products or services that an advertiser offers. You can choose from several subjects or topics that you may find interesting and relevant to your blog. This would allow you to earn money expressing your opinion at the same time posting an article that is within your blog’s niche.

If you have several blogs, you can submit all of them to Smorty for approval, and once approved, Smorty allows you to post on these blogs, thus giving you more opportunities to blog for money

And guess what? Unlike other opportunities, Smorty will issue their payment on a weekly basis so definitely you’re not going to wait for weeks to get paid.

So what are you waiting for? visit Smorty’s Website now to start earning.

Sigh…it would be much better if he opened the destination page in a new window (pardon my being impatient, I’m sick hehehe)

So instead of tracking back where I got the blog’s URL, here I am writing a post hehe…

I believe that doing so would increase the time spent reading your posts and a possibility for the readers to navigate your blog more.

To do this, add target="_blank" on your links as shown below

If you are using WordPress, opening the destination page in a new window is easy. Just highlight the text to be linked and click the ‘insert/edit link’ icon while creating/updating your post, and select the ‘Open link in a new window’ option in the target dropdown list.

Click on this link to see how it works

The destination page will now be opened in a new window (IE) or in a new tab (Firefox), thus making it easier for your readers to comeback in the window where your blog is opened.

I can’t see any effect on this SEO wise, but as a reader, this would really makes my reading easy.

Do you agree in taking some weight loss pills?

• I am new to PHP and I don’t want to mess with my live blog while messing with my theme /template’s code.
• I can still create draft posts with the look and feel of my online blog even if I’m not connected to the internet (for some reason)
• I can test and debug my blog’s template whenever I want
• And several other reasons hehehe

If your blog is hosted on a free host and you’re just using a subdomain, and do not have full control over your blog platform’s files, definitely this post will not be that helpful to you. Nevertheless, if you plan to host your own blog site, consider this as your future reference. But still, if you prefer to have a local version of your blog, you may do so.

Requirements:

• Basic Technical Knowledge, Yes for Techie Girls and Techie Guys only hahaha, you don’t need to be an expert though, since I myself is not an expert on the technology used when i started blogging. Basically, all you need to possess is the knowledge on basic things such as installing and the ability to figure out things easily when ask to upload files on your own host, things like that (and if you think that I am not using some ‘alien words’)
• A web server, in this case we will use Apache (widely used)
• Of Course PHP
• And definitely a database, we will going to use MySQL.
• An optional FTP client software

Don’t worry I won’t be asking you to install everything individually, there’s always a simpler way of course. Illustrated just to give you an idea on what’s being used

Ok let’s begin

XAMPP Installation

1. Download XAMPP at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html, just select the distribution specific for the Operating System you’re using. I suggest that you choose the installer version since its complete and easy to install.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

Source: http://www.apachefriends.org

2. Install XAMPP. If you opt for the installer version (which is the easiest), just double click and follow the instructions on the screen. If you encounter any problems upon installation (which I think very rare to happen), just visit apachefriends.org site for installation assistance.
3. When the installation is complete, you will find XAMPP under Start -> Programs -> Apache Friends -> XAMPP. You can use the XAMPP Control Panel to start/stop all server and also install/uninstall services.

   

4. As of the moment, we only need the Apache and MySQL services, so just click the [Start] Button corresponding to the two services. A ‘Running’ indicator will be displayed on the side of the services when they are successfully started.
5. After Apache starts, open the URL http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 . The XAMPP Welcome screen should be displayed. Now that XAMPP is successfully installed, we are ready to go to the next step.

    

   

Database Creation

Since WordPress requires a database to store your blog details, posts etc, you must create a database on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.

1. Go to http://localhost. Just click on the phpMyAdmin option located on the left side of the XAMPP welcome screen.
2. The PhpMyAdmin screen should be displayed. Just type the name of the new database, (in this case I use mytestdb) in the ‘Create New Database’ field. Select the option UTF-8 Unicode_ci on the collation dropdown list.

    

   

3. Just click the [Create] Button to create the new database.
4. For testing and illustration purposes, lets use the default user ‘root’ with no password.
5. Now that we already have what we need, let’s proceed with the WordPress installation.

WordPress Installation

Note: Just change the slash and backslash notation depending on your operating system

1. Download the latest version of wordpress located at http://wordpress.org/download/
2. Extract/Unzip WordPress at C:/xampp/htdocs/ directory
3. You should now have the ‘wordpress’ folder under C:/xampp/htdocs/
4. Browse through C:/xampp/htdocs/wordpress/ directory and open wp-config-sample.php file using any text editor.
5. Replace the default value for the database, username and password as ilustrated below:

   

6. Save the modified file as wp-config.php under the same folder
7. On your browser, go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php. Just follow the instructions on the screen and you all set.
8. After the installation, you can now access your offline blog at http://localhost/wordpress/.
9. If you wish to change the default theme, just copy your favorite theme at C:/ xampp/ htdocs/ wordpress/ wp-content/ themes/ directory and update the theme in your admin panel (‘Change your site’s look or theme’ option)

Basically that’s it!

So what really is a sitemap? Just like a real map do, a sitemap is a tool to help search engines and your visitors on their way to your site.

The Sitemaps Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps

Knowing this fact made me realized that my site should have one. Since I am not knowledgeable with the technology used, I researched about some online sitemap generator that can help me with it.

So here we go..My sitemap’s URL is located here, It is a HTML version targeted for my visitors. The html version and a sitemap to be submitted to google and other search engines can be easily generated from XML-Sitemaps located here.

It’s easy to use so I guess no need to post some instructions here since there is a detailed one on the site itself. Just upload the generated sitemap(s) on your root directory when done.

After the above procedure, go to Google’s Webmaster Tools . Just create an account if you’re not yet registered. On the left site you’ll see the ’SITEMAP’ options, just click it and you’re on your way.

If there’s an easier way to create a sitemap, please feel free to share it with us by commenting on this post.

Well for a newbie like me, this is one great opportunity to be exposed and get additional traffic, so I’ll definitely try my luck and hopefully get my blog featured on their main page for 24 hrs (fingers crossed). Of course they won’t feature a low quality site, so your site must have some good content to be featured.

Is it free? Yes it’s FREE for now, so you better hurry, visit their site at http://www.fechr.com and get your site F?chr-ed!