This is my second theme for the serendipity blog engine. Its got a shiny banner graphic and comes in three colours.

Changing colours

Changing theme options in s9y1.1

By default the theme is in blue but you can change it to red or green as well. The first step is to enable smarty templating for the categories plugin using the "configure plugins" option in serendipity administration. If you don’t do this the xml feed icon for categories will not appear correctly. If you have s9y 1.1 you can easily change the theme’s colours using the "manage styles" option in the administrator interface. A few other options are also available for users of this version of s9y.

Update 30 July : I have fixed a number of bugs in the latest release of this theme including entry preview in firefox and other modern browsers.

You can download the theme here.

The other day I came across this website that was promoting a wordpress plugin that displays the hijri date in blog entries. I thought this was a fantastic idea and I should try and implement this on my site. As a Muslim I think I ought use the hijri calendar system. I also thought it would be easy to implement this given the wide choice of open source software available on the net. I didn’t think I could program the actual gregorian to hijri conversion myself. I just wanted a php script that I could modify. Unfortunately the code provided on that site was not upto the mark. It kept outputting incorrect dates. And despite my initial optimism it took lots and lots of googling before I came across a useable script. In this post I describe how I modified this script and integrated it with serendipity to achieve the effect you see above (at least at the time of writing). I also provide links to the neccessary code so you can implement this same effect on your blog! Continue reading →

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I have just made the first version of my first serendipity theme/template. I call it (creatively enough) “brown paper”.

The entire purpose of making a new template was to make this website my own bit of work. I am never fully comfortable with using somebody elses work. I find myself itching to customise it and make it my own.

I wanted to make my website look like a stained piece of yellowish paper. The paper had to be yellow because I think that makes it easier to read text. The stains would give it a well-used feel. I have successfully tested it in Firefox 1.5, Seamonkey 1.0, IE 6.0 and Opera 8.5. It displays too wide in IE 5.5 causing the horizontal scroll bars to appear.

EDIT: I have completed this template. I fixed a few bugs relating to comments display and admin new entry preview. A few other minor changes were also made. Its available for download here and via spartacus.This theme is a modification of the default s9y template. See the included credits file for details.