Serendipity

Serving the same textual content on different website pages can be very bad from a search engine optimization point of view. This is because it makes it difficult to rank well in the search engine results pages for that content and dilutes the benefits of incoming links to it.

Most Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogging systems in particular have a tendency to display the same content in multiple places. Unfortunately serendipity(s9y) is no exception. In this post I look at how to minimize duplicate content in an s9y powered blog.

Ornate is an open source template by freecsstemplates.org that I recently ported to serendipity. Its got a nicely decorated left sidebar. Red and white are the primary colours of this theme.

I am releasing the Nightwatch serendipity theme for free. I call it that because the theme looks good if you set a night time cityscape as the header image. You can see a preview of it below:

Nightwatch screenshot. Click to enlarge

I recently discovered the "markup: smarty" event plugin in spartacus! It allows you to add smarty tags in your entries and sidebar html nuggets. I installed it and am using smarty tags within an HTML nugget sidebar plugin to selectively display links in the sidebar.

Some of the links are supposed to display sitewide while others are homepage only. Using smarty in the HTML nugget allows me to display them correctly:

This article shows you how to implement header image selection via the media manager in your serendipity templates configuration.

I first introduced this feature in the beautiful day theme and it proved to be quite popular.