Serendipity

I have updated two of my serendipity blog system templates. The following updates were made:

Freshy: The ever popular freshy theme now has the additional option of custom header image selection via the serendipity media manager a la beautiful day.

RoundedCorner: I have updated rounded corner to make it easy for users to add, remove and modify links in the top navigation bar via the admin suite.

Click to view full screenshot

I have been using this ported template on my blog for a few months now and I finally created a distribution ready version of it. Beautiful Day is a simple two color pastel shaded theme by Viktor Persson. He makes clever use of simple vector shapes and soft colors to create a serene theme.

I have worked hard on the serendipity port to include a number of configurable options for this theme. You can access the following options in administration suite > manage styles:

Yesterday I was looking through my website's cpanel when I noticed that my mySQL database was taking 40+ MB of space. This was way too much for a my little old blog so I fired up phpmyadmin to take a closer look. It turned out that the serendipity spam block table was occupying almost all the space with over 22,000 rows in it!

Most websites on the Internet can be accessed using both just their domain name and the www subdomain and domain name. For ex: www.example.com and example.com may lead to the same website. Some search engines consider the www version and the non-www version to be seperate websites and assign different Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions and or page rank to them. This often results in a split page rank where the non-www and www versions of a site have different page rank. To prevent something like this from happening it helps to canonicalize your website URL. This means that you should select one version as a standard and redirect from the other to it.