Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

After a request from Garvin Hicking, the lead developer of Serendipity, for a port of the hugely successful Wordpress theme Hemingway to Serendipity, I thought I'd take up the challenge, in between updating this site and continuing to work on other templates - which reminds me, I need to do more on the updated default theme, ah well not enough hours - anyway, enough rambling. The screenshot shows the first very rough draft of the startpage of Hemingway for Serendipity.

This is an interesting template to work on. First, the startpage only displays the latest two entries, and they are truncated. I've been forced to create a new smarty template file for these that removes all the other bits and pieces that you would normally expect from a Serendipity entry, specifically all the plugin code, comments, comment form etc. Those bits might be added back in later.

The next challenge was the sidebars. Hemingway actually uses three columns for sidebars, fortunately Garvin is really wanting to push development of Serendipity and the latest alpha of Serendipity 1.1 includes a new template configuration option that allows the template designer to add more sidebar spots around the screen instead of the previous two.

This is actually an amazingly powerful tool and will mean less troubleshooting in the future. Let me tell you why. At present, any template that doesn't support the traditional left and right sidebars, for example if the template is two column and only one sidebar, is confusing to many new users of Serendipity. What happens is they happily go into their plugin management screen and drag plugins into the left or right sidebar, then expect these to showup in the template, but they don't.

And the reason they don't is because the template only has one column for sidebar plugins, then the user makes a complaint in the forums, and the whole things gets really confusing to explain. The new template option that Garvin has coded will allow the template designer to remove a sidebar column from the options list if it isn't needed, meaning that the user will never even get the option of placing a plugin into a column that doesn't exist - Beautiful, an elegant solution, and a MAJOR step forward for Serendipity theme design.

Over the next few days we'll be updating most of our Serendipity zipfiles. The goal is to make every single Serendipity template produced by us fully compatible with versions 0.91, 1.0, and 1.1 of Serendipity.

We are also implementing version numbers for all templates. Since our goal is to make all templates compatible with v1.1 of Serendipity, and to avoid confusion between our version numbers and s9y version numbers, we plan to start all updated template version numbers at 1.1 as well. This means that within the 'Manage Styles' tab in your Serendipity admin suite our templates will be named like this, ceejay01 v1.1.

Any further updates to our templates will be given an alphanumeric code following this, such as ceejay01 v1.1 upd1 indicating that the template is currrently in its first update. We hope this won't be confusing to users, and that it will give us, and the Serendipity development team, the ability to troubleshoot any issues that users have by comparing their version number against the current version.

In addition, we'll be removing all links to Serendipity zipfiles from within the entries on this blog, and instead referring all download requests to our new Serendipity Templates page. This means that over the next few days our rss feed might show a lot of older entries, we apologise for this but believe our site will be more usable once the process is complete.

I've been following the IAU congress in Prague with a keen eye, mostly because I was looking forward to seeing how the vote on defining planets was going. I'm actually pleased with the result, I think the new definition works well, and will for the forseeable future.

However, when I told the other half about the outcome of the vote she seemed sad. Turns out when she was at school they had to learn the names of the planets and the teacher came up with a little rhyme to help them out - "My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Up Near Pugwash" - silly I know, but the first letter of each word was enough to remind them of the order of the planets, "Mercury. Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto"

Well of course the little rhyme doesn't work anymore, and she's sure schoolkids of today will have a similar rhyme they use to remember the planets, so how are they going to cope now?

This tutorial demonstrates how to place two background images behind the HTML <blockquote> tag. The first image will be positioned at the top left of our blockquote and will be our opening quote mark, and the other at the bottom right which will be our closing quote mark. The apporach I'm going to demonstrate appears to work in all of the modern browsers, although some of the older browsers might struggle.

The reason for this tutorial is the inability of CSS to allow more than one background on a single page element, so in the case of the blockquote I, like many other template designers, have resorted to creating borders and background colors to separate blockquotes from the surrounding text. We do this because many blog and forum scripts provide a quote button that simply wraps the quote in <blockquote> </blockquote> tags.

Using CSS and the :first-letter pseudo class, we are able to assign two background images to our HTML <blockquote>, and all we need to do is position them so that they work correctly. The image below shows you what I mean.

The opening quote mark and larger first letter are defined by blockquote:first-letter, and the border, background and closing quote mark are defined by the blockquote style.
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Wow, this is particularly exciting for me, I get the SitePro News email alert almost every day filled with great SEO stuff, and 'holy carp', thanks to Jude for the phrase, they've setup a blog, using Serendipity, and best of all using a template I designed. Wow, can I say that again, Wow!

Ok, to the people at SitePro News, thanks for the vote of confidence in our project, it means a lot to the Serendipity developers and me in particular to see our project being used by high profile people like yourselves. I suspect the template will probably change at some point to match your site design, and if you need any help, please contact me, I'd be pretty delighted to help out.

Before the Soccer World Cup in Germany I produced a soccer theme featuring the flags of every competing nation. It is now time to release the update to that template allowing it to be used for any soccer enthusiast or club.

The flags have been removed and a navbar put in their place. The navbar links will need to be edited, users of Serendipity 1.0 need to edit index.tpl while users of Serendipity 1.1 simply need to make their changes when they install the template through the 'Manage Styles' secion of the admin suite.

Anyway, feel free to download and use this template. It's been released under a GPL license.

According to Reuters, Hansdehar in Haryana has uploaded itself to the 'Net. Great headline, but somewhat misleading, anyway the upshot is that Hansdehar village is featured on the smartvillages.org website that will become a portal for Indian villages so that they can communicate with the world and find solutions to the day-to-day problems they face.

I'm probably going to get hung out to dry for my opinion on this, I'm sure a bunch of liberal minded souls will say I'm being unnecessarily harsh in my observation, but I think the photographer should be fired. Not because of the quality of the images, but because there seems to have very little effort made to get the villagers to smile. I'm sure poverty doesn't prevent them from having moments of light heartedness, and seriously, if the villagers are going to benefit from the website they need to be seen to be having fun.

On a positive note, the very fact of getting publicity like this is going to facilitate trade in both goods and knowledge. School children from around the world will visit their site and send them emails. The village children will be exposed to other cultures very quickly, and its very likely the villagers will make lasting connections with villages in other parts of the world that have similar problems. That's exciting, an Internet presence means these villagers don't have to rely on remote government officials to communicate with the outside world.

But there are going to be unexpected side effects. Hansdehar is going to find itself dragged into the 21st century whether it likes it or not, and suddenly every child will be downloading and sharing hip-hop, they will be creating their own MySpace accounts and requesting bomber jackets be sent to them, they will suddenly start speaking ghetto English just like their peers. Life will never be the same in Hansdehar ever again.

I'm testing the new blogger beta, and created a new site http://carlgalloway.blogspot.com to start the ball rolling. The first thing I noticed when I started the sign up process is that the beta version uses your Google account as your identity, which is awesome because my homepage is the customised Google page with all the feeds I subscribe to.

After playing with the site for a few minutes a couple of things occurred to me, the dashboard design looks somehow cleaner, perhaps a little less cluttered and more intuitive, the changes are small and all of the functionality that we've become used to is still there, but by changing the navigation colors slightly the whole design seems more pleasing. Also, that horrible publishing spinner that used to just sit there and haunt you while the site was being republished has gone. Yay!

If you've read the official announcement of the beta program at Blogger Buzz, or seen the virtual tour you'll know that labels are now available for blogger blogs, and I was really keen to try these out. Long time blogger users are going to love these, there's been a lot hype about this giving bloggers a category function similar to other blog engines such as Serendipity, but when you're creating or editing an entry they feel more like tags to me. I'd be very interested to see if Technorati actually picks them up. In fact I'll be running some tests on that over the next couple of weeks and report back when I know for sure. Read More