Serendipity

Beautiful Day serendipity version

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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:

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22,000 spam messages blocked!

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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!

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Yes WWW! No WWW!

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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.

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How to summarise posts in serendipity rss feeds

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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!

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