Serendipity Blog

What a pleasant surprise this morning when I checked my stats and discovered the Organización del Guarderío, the umbrella organization for the Guardia Civil is using Serendipity and one of our s9y themes as for their new blog about the activities of the various guards. Wow, what a compliment!

Being very keen on protecting the environment we are both stoked beyond belief that the organization responsible for protecting the environment in Spain. They arrest poachers and protect the waterways and coastline and we can't tell you how gratifying it is to be part of the effort in Spain, albeit only having provided a template.

This one is for Harald, but any Serendipity user will be able to use the code so keep reading. The Add This Bookmark and Share Widget is the little box you see under my entries that pops up and let's users stumble or bookmark my entries.
[Hint] press the friggin' button right now! [/Hint]

So, the code needs to go into entries.tpl of the template you're using, just open this in your favorite text editor, and find the entry footer code for plugins which will look like this {$entry.add_footer}. Now add an HTML breakline <br /> then paste the following code;

{$entrydata.url|escape:url}
<!-- AddThis Bookmark Button BEGIN -->
<script type="text/javascript">
addthis_url = '{$entry.rdf_ident|escape:url}';
addthis_title = '{$entry.title|escape:url}';
addthis_pub = 'carlgalloway';
</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" ></script>
<!-- AddThis Bookmark Button END -->

You need to replace 'carlgalloway' with your own 'Add This' username, so make sure you've created an account. Once you've done this, upload the new entries.tpl to your blog server and enjoy the rush of stumbles and bookmarks you'll get. Don't forget to press my button!!

This has been a long time in the making but finally it's here, a content first CSS only three column design based on ceejay's Pixabella05.

This first version of the template only includes the regular content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and doesn't yet include the extra blue colorset. Both of these features are still being developed for the Serendipity version which I hope to have completed in the next few weeks so be sure to bookmark this page or subscribe to my feed for updates.

So, why am I releasing an incomplete template, well, it isn't incomplete, it will work well for anyone looking for the included layout and colorset but I'm frantically busy developing designs for Blogger and Ning in addition to some client work and the Hawaii template is just sitting there taunting me so it's better to release it and let people start using it than have it languish on my harddrive. Get the zipfile and let me know what you think of this design, and please report any errors you find.

In this video tutorial I show Serendipity users how to install the HTML Nugget plugin and then use it to add a network badge to their blog sidebar. The same technique can be used to place Adsense advertising into a sidebar, or a counter.

This video complements the video I prepared a few days ago on plugin management and is aimed at new users.

I'm still looking for ideas for other s9y screencasts so please add your comment below to give me ideas.