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Today we went into town to pick up a copy of the "Canon EOS Digital Rebel Digital Field Guide" by Charlotte Lowrie for the other half. First glance looks like it might be an awesome book to learn about the intricacies of her camera, but I might take a look as well and see if I can pick up any hints on taking good photos, and this brings me to the rabbit.

Go check out my flickr page and you'll see a cute furry little fellow who popped his head out just as we walked by. We weren't actually on a bushwalk, we just wanted to stop and see if we could get any interesting postcards, but as we pulled up at the park rangers hut where they have a tourist shop we spotted him (or is it her).

Anyway he didn't seem too worried by our presence, I even managed to get within a couple of meters of him, its a shame my hand isn't as steady as it once was because a couple of shots that I hoped would turn out actually didn't, but at least I got this one.

Now, onto my site, I've finally decided to drop categories altogether and use tags for all entries. I'll be firing up phpmyadmin over the next few weeks and adding them wherever they're needed, and then I'll be deleting all categories. Any of my regulars who subscribe to my category feeds need to be aware that these will no longer be updated. I'm not sure if I'll provide the feed links for individual tags, probably not, but we'll see, it depends on how many angry emails I get.

Also, this template isn't finished yet, a few things are annoying me about it that I still want to fix but I think I'm going to be offline for a couple of weeks soon so might not get the chance to fix it this month, if you have any ideas please let me know. I also finally added the Hemingway template to my templates page, and in addition, I finally released the merged carl blue and green template, which in a fit of original naming I have called carl01.

Congratulations to Garvin and the development team of Serendipity. Version 1.1 was released today, and promises to become the standard for all users very quickly, especially given the volume of v1.1 templates and plugins that are being produced. I'll be updating to this latest release over the next few days and I heartily encourage all Serendipity users to do that same.

To celebrate the release of v1.1, myself and Matthew Groeninger have created a new v1.1 only template, which we believe showcases all of the best features of v1.1. "Weather" incorporates multiple sidebar columns, makes extensive use of Smarty to display a variety of different views for the startpage, overview pages, archive pages, detail pages and plugin pages.

But wait, check out the weather...
But most interesting of all is the integrated weather for your city! Yes, you read that correctly, within the admin screen you can select your nearest metar site and coordinates for your city and this template will let your site visitors see the current weather for your location and even day, night, sunrise or sunset for your city. In our opinion this is one of the most exciting modifications to a Serendipity template that could be imagined. Hmmm, maybe that's a lie, Matthew is a very imaginative guy.

Ok, so you want to download this template and try it out for yourselves. A couple of points to note, this is a big template, the zipfile is over 750kb, please only download it if you really want it. Over the next few days we're sure it will end up in Spartacus, we just need to make sure that everyone is happy with it. Ooh, before I forget, there are two versions of index.tpl included with this template, and some users may need to switch to the other version. One of the versions (index.tpl) uses apostrophes within the smarty code (at the if statement that evaluates the day/night function) and this seems to work well in some installations, but another version is also included (index_alternate.tpl) which does not use apostrophes, and is the version Matthew himself is using. At least I think its that way round, it might be the other way round, but you'll figure it out if you end up with night instead of day.

I'm really sorry that I've had to include two versions of index.tpl, and I'm sure this will be fixed in time for this template to be added to Spartacus. Also, either myself or Matthew will most likely be adding the weather module code into a vanilla template for other users to customise.

As Christmas approaches I know that many of our regular site visitors will be interested in a new template with a Christmas greeting, and we hope this particular design will appeal to you. Its our first Christmas template, and hopefully not our last. The header image is fairly clean and simple, and features a single tree on a small hill covered in snow, whispy clouds and snowflakes falling.

The 'Merry Christmas' message in the header image can be swapped for a German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Maltese message by simply selecting the option in the template config screen if you are using v1.1 of Serendipity. Other users will need to edit index.tpl in the template folder. Download Christmas 2006 from our templates page

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