Abdussamad's blogspace

The world of web hosting can be a bit overwhelming. Website hosting companies almost scream about their fat hosting packages on their sites inorder to get people to spend money on hosting. But what is it that you really need to host a blog?

After over a month of wasted time due to my new ISPs incompetence I finally have a "broadband" connection. Actually its not really broadband but, at 100Kbps, its faster than my previous dialup connection and its always on so its a bit better. I am actually quite lucky to have this type of connection because bandwidth is really expensive in Pakistan and so is a decent Internet connection. But I am stumped as to what to do with my new found online freedom. For starters I downloaded the latest version of seamonkey. But now I have no idea what to do lol. Should I head on over to youtube? Hmmm I wonder what people with fast connections do online?

In preparation for the next Google dance I have gone and ported Julien De Luca's freshy wordpress theme to serendipity. Freshy is one of the most popular themes for wordpress and it includes a whole host of options for users wanting to customize it. I decided to port it after a user requested it on the s9y forums. But I later realised that it wasn't as easy to port as I first thought. All those admin options make the theme really complicated and I haven't included some options so it is really a partial port. The following options are available to users of s9y 1.1 who use the ported theme:

• Change header image. You can choose from a number of images included with the theme.
• Customize the links in the navigation bar
• Change the highlight colour of the navigation bar
• UPDATE: 30 Jan 2007 - You can now customize the label of the link in the top navigation bar that points to your blog front page i.e. the "home" link. This option allows you to specify a label in your own language to fit in with the rest of your blog.
• UPDATE: 11 May 2007 - You can now also use a custom header image using the serendipity media manager. This feature was back ported from the beautiful day theme.
• UPDATE: 1 April 2008 - Freshy now supports two sidebars. If you have plugins in both the left and the right sidebar freshy will expand to accommodate them.
• UPDATE: 15 April 2008 - Fixed a bug that caused certain plugins to not display correctly with freshy in 2 sidebar mode.
• UPDATE: 18 April 2008 - Improved security of the header image selection code.

I omitted the option to customize the colours of text, links etc. and the option to choose between predefined styles that are included with the original theme. I did however compress the header images so they take less time to load. You can download freshy here.

Technical details and customization info for pre 1.1 s9y users follows.

I have 3 serendipity powered weblogs now and on each one I install certain key plugins that help me promote my site and add useful functionality to it.

First up is spartacus. Spartacus is an event plugin that gives me access to serendipity's online plugin and themes repository. With spartacus I can install additional plugins or change my blog design easily. Spartacus is one of the best features of serendipity and a similar plugin is not available in any of the blog or cms systems I have tried. Users of other blog systems have to first download plugins or themes from their author's sites and then upload them to their own server for installation. Spartacus lets you install plugins and themes straight from your admin panel.