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.

Fig 1 Click to view full-sized image

You can install spartacus by login into your admin control panel and clicking on configure "plugins" under "appearance" in the left side menu (fig 1). On the next page you select "Click here to install a new event plugin" under "event plugins" (fig 2). You’ll then be show a list of all event plugins and you can select spartacus from that list.

Fig 2 Click to view full image.

After I have installed spartacus I install the Google sitemap plugin. This event plugin generates a google sitemap each time an entry is published or saved. It also informs google each time you update your blog. A google sitemap is an XML file that links to each page in your site. The Google search engine uses the sitemap to speedily index your site. Since Google does not have to crawl your entire site each time it visits but just the latest entries, you save bandwidth and ensure that your newest posts are indexed by Google as soon as possible.

I then like to install the announce entries event plugin that pings social bookmarking sites like technorati and weblogs.com each time I post an entry.

Finally, the free tag event plugin is also useful because it allows you to tag your entries. The tags also end up as meta keywords in your blog’s source thereby helping search engines make sense of your content.