Eid Mubarak!

Eid Mubarak to all my fellow Muslims! Eid ul Adha or Bakra-ki-Eid is one of two Eids in the Muslim calendar. This year millions of Muslims in Pakistan and all over the world will be celebrating Eid-ul-Adha. In Pakistan alone millions of Muslims will be performing qurbani i.e. sacrificing animals for God Almighty. The meat of the sacrificed animals is divided into three portions. One portion is distributed among the poor, one portion is given to one’s friends, neighbors and relatives and one portion is kept for one’s own consumption. A lot of people in Pakistan are so poor that Eid-ul-Adha is the only time of the year that they get to eat meat.

The lesson of Eid-ul-Azha is that Muslims should be willing to sacrifice anything for Allah. God tested Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam by asking him to sacrifice what was most precious to him – his son. Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam submitted to Allah’s will and prepared to sacrifice his son. But Allah was only testing Hazrat Ibraheem’s devotion so just as Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi salaam was about to perform the sacrifice Allah placed a sheep in place of his son and Hazrat Ibraheem alaihi sallaam sacrificed that sheep.

Eid-ul-Azha is also being celebrated by a lot of Hajis performing Hajj in Saudi Arabia. This year over 2.3 million Muslims are performing Haj. The images coming out of Saudi Arabia strengthen one’s imaan or faith. Indeed each and every Muslim wishes that he too could be present in Saudi Arabia to perform Haj this year. This year is also Hajj-e-Akbar because it included a Friday.

It is amazing how Allah has given the Arabs and Muslims the resources and skill to organize the biggest gathering of humans ever. Managing the flow of more than 2.3 million people is no mean feat. Inshallah will accept all the hajis haj.

Refreshing freshy theme serendipity port

freshy screenshot
Click to enlarge

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.

Freshy partial screenshotI 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.

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Essential serendipity plugins

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.

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