Internet Marketing, Make Money Online

I've been agonizing over this for months. My themes site themes.carlgalloway.com has been sitting there gathering dust, and I need to make a decision about whether to keep it or delete it. Let me tell you my reasons.

First of all, more and more Serendipity users are upgrading to Serendipity v1.1, and as they do this, they are discovering the hidden features of many of our templates that allow them to change colorsets, or swap columns or a variety of other options. Unfortunately, the themes site doesn't let users see this unless I give them access to the admin suite, and frankly I'm not prepared to do that. This means that really the only thing I can do is write up a summary of options or provide a screenshot of the template options page. It also means that the themes site is really only showing users a single set of options that are chosen by me, but might not be what they're looking for.

Secondly, maintaining separate blogs is becoming annoying. I really want to focus my energies on writing tutorials, showing off our photographs (especially the piccies ceejay takes - she's a much better photographer than me), or writing short fiction, but I just feel like its too much work at present.

Last, but not least, most of the entries on the themes site don't tell users very much, and in some cases, even seem to loosely worded duplicates of entries found on this site. From an SEO point of view, which is a subject I've been trying to learn about, thjis appears to be a bad situation.

So, over the next few weeks I'm going to discontinue the themes site, and if my pagerank suffers, or my ranking in the major search engines changes, well so be it. Usability of this site is much more important to me. To my regular readers, your advice or comments on this one would be very welcome. I need to know your thoughts.

Regular readers will know that I frequently trawl my backlinks, logs, and referrers to find other Blogmasters who use one of our templates, and now and again I post a short entry about them. Today I've got another couple of sites where the webmaster has customised a template freely available from this site, and made it their own with the addition of their own graphics and styles.

Tesoro High School surprised me when I saw their page, I always thought schools exist on .edu domains, and perhaps be part of a government website, but it seems not in California. Tesoro HS are using Serendipity with our andreas06 port, and have customised the header graphic quite substantially. I did a quick google on the school because their website is so new, and found the school itself is also new being only a few years old. Despite this they are knocking up some impressive stat's, so kudos to them. Having said that, if they use Serendipity, you'd expect nothing less.

Our next site, The Meadows, is a quircky sort of site owned by a man who raises turtles, takes photgraphs and talks about his personal life and work. Interesting site to read, but what really grabbed our attention was the changes he's made to the ceejay01 template we produced. It seems that quite a few Serendipity and Blogger users like this template. We're thinking of making the .psd available for the header graphic since so many users seem to like the borders and styles, but want to customise their header image.

After a few weeks of development, its finally ready to be tested by the world at large. Hemingway is bleeding edge at the moment, and will only work as it is intended to on Serendipity v1.1 beta4 (or one of the latest nightly snapshots) so be warned!

It's possible that many small issues need to be dealt with well, actually a few less thanks to loyal Serendipity users, and this template won't be fully complete until the Serendipity developers have finished developing their multi-column sidebar plugin selector. So expect minor updates to Hemingway over the next few weeks whilst this is all wrapped up. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Matthias, Costa and Ivan for the German, Polish, and Bulgarian language translations. I would dearly love to ship the final version of Hemingway with other Serendipity supported languages, so please read my original request if you're interested in being credited with this.

EDIT: Thanks to a request from Sebastian, I've incorporated an extra sidebar, which will only ever appear in the detail page and allows the entry's links plugin or any plugin for that matter to be displayed on the entry detail page under footer info in the left-hand column. Hope you like it Sebastian. Also thanks to Yellowled and Costa, I've changed the way the authors plugin and entry links plugins are displayed. The list links will take more effort, it seems the location of the css may be hardcoded into the plugin, but I'll report back once I've done some more work on it.

The zipfile has been upated, so download Hemingway