Serendipity

Readers may wish to refer to part one of my summary posts in serendipity blog feeds guide.

After reading a blog post about the need to specify meaningful summaries of posts for rss and atom feeds I decided to take another look at post summarising in serendipity feeds.

By default serendipity places the entire entry body in your rss feeds but not the extended body. If you're like me you rarely use the extended body when making entries so your feed subscribers can read your entire posts without having to visit your site. This defeats the entire purpose of RSS feeds that are supposed to increase traffic to your site. Furthermore there are a lot of scraper sites out there that use your rss feeds to duplicate your site's content. A lot of these rightly link back to your site but they still put your site in danger of Google's so called duplicate content penalty. Supposedly google can't tell which site was the originator of the content and may penalise the wrong site. So what is an s9y blogger to do? Well hack serendipity of course!

I am releasing a serendipity port of the Sahara template by freecsstemplates.org . This template includes very few images making this a fast loading theme. The designer has made clever use of small variations in colour to create a nice effect. He has also used serif fonts for text which adds to the overall feel of the theme.

The ported version includes a customizable navigation bar and the option to toggle author name display with every entry. You will need serendipity 1.1 or higher to be able to configure these options in the administration suite. Users of older s9y versions can still use this template but they will have to manually edit the .tpl files to customize this theme.

Download Sahara template for serendipity

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.