Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

I'm pleased to announce that Martin has released a version of Bar Sinister for users of Serendipity. This is a great template that shows off some serious graphics, and in the download version provides users with a blank header meaning you could use the lightbox plugin to superimpose your own graphics or image.

Check it out, and be sure to let Martin know what you think of his design.

This short tutorial is about changing the text used in sidebar titles with images so that unusual fonts or artistic headers become possible. This is a really cool effect, and if you're a fan of the css Zen Garden you'll know that websites can be works of art.

The designers of Serendipity really did think of all possibilities when they gave every sidebar block its own unique style name.

Replacing the sidebar title with an image is relatively easy, start by creating your image and give it a width and height that compliment your sidebar. Read More

This is the most exciting news its been my pleasure to announce in the whole time this blog has been up, Serendipity has finally reached an absolute milestone, VERSION 1.0, yeehah!

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the final release version of Serendipity 1.0, an advanced and flexible blogging/cms web application. With its comprehensive feature set, including multiple authors, internationalization, templated output, and an open plugin architecture, Serendipity's stable 1.0 release is ready to become the most popular Web application in the world!

I know that many of my site visitors aren't current bloggers, or use other systems, but please do yourselves a favour and check out Serendipity. I've been using Serendipity since it was at version 0.7 and its really come of age, and Garvin Hicking, the lead developer of s9y is probably going to get head-hunted when the news gets out.

This is a really solid piece of software that just works, and best of all is designed for the average blogger or small business owner who needs something that does the job but also lets them add plugins or change templates by simply clicking the download link. That is so useful, users never really ever need to do any html coding, they don't need to become a programmer to make even the smallest changes, and our user and developer community is second to none.

Have you ever thought it would be great if you could make the latest entry in your Serendipity blog stand out, perhaps use a different color, or even add some imagery to let your visitors know this entry is special?

Using some Smarty code and css we can, imagine how much more usable your blog would be. Even more so if your blog is part of a network. If you run competitions, review new products, or perhaps comment on breaking news, your site visitors will appreciate seeing at a glance which entry is most important.

So what could your latest entry or sticky post look like? Well, CSS allows us to do so much, you could literally change every single style. In my experiments I changed the background color around the entry title, in another I added a background image which reads 'Breaking News', but you could go so far as to give your entry different font settings, adjust your margins and padding, perhaps even remove the entry footer so your latest entry looks like an html box.

So how do you go about making your latest entry stand out? The key is to understand that all entries on overview pages are given a unique id starting at 0 which is the top (first) entry. Once we understand this, we also need to make sure Serendipity only changes our first entry if it also appears on the startpage otherwise the top entry of every page will adopt our new styles. Read More

A bit of exciting news, the other half has decided she wants to start designing templates for Serendipity, Blogger and generally for open source. She's a much better designer than me (actually she's studied design whereas I'm just a know-it-all) so we should be able to start putting together some interesting themes soon. The image to the left is a preview of her first template, which she'll be calling ceejay01.

She tells me she still wants to add a few flourishes to this design so it might be a few days before its released but I'm sure it will be well received. I'll be setting her up as an author on this blog and her designs will be available from here.

Wow, I had no idea plugin development for Serendipity was so easy, but do you see that little sidebar title that says 'Sponsors', that is my very first plugin for Serendipity. Its actually a very basic sidebar plugin that displays sponsors ad's from text-link-ads.com. I'm trying that out because I'd really like to make a little bit of pocket money from this blog. Anyway, it only works on the sidebar at the moment, but I plan to develop it into a full plugin that allows better postioning of the ad's, perhaps even above the first entry or even above the banner.

Of course I'm no expert in php, but if it works and if I can develop this plugin to be more useful to other users then I'll make it available. If you would like to test it yourself, you'll need a text-link-ads account, then just make a comment or email me and I'll send what I've got so far.

What it does right now is allow a user to upload the text-link-ads php code and the blank xml file into your uploads folder, then install the plugin and you're away.

If you've ever released a template you'll know that screenshots are mandatory, but sometimes you just don't feel like clearing your desk, setting up your mini tripod and camera, and then adjusting the curtains to get perfect lighting.

In fact if you're like me you probably just want to click your mouse button and have the image automagically appear already cropped and ready to use.

Good news, no more cameras or hassling wih Photoshop or any other screenshot program, not anymore, now all you have to do is bookmark sitesnat.ch and next time you need a screenshot, click that mouse. For even quicker screenshots, bookmark the javascript link.

Jannis and Martin have put in some serious effort making this work and it shows, the site looks good, works fast, and its free. Check it out, it automatically produces the screenshot, then if you click on that, you can also get the full size version. How easy is that?