Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

Every few days I go through my site logs to see where my visitors are coming from. Its a big task, since this site is now getting over anywhere from 100 to 200 new visitors per day, in addition to all the regular visitors. When I go through my logs I often come across other blog sites where one of my Serendipity templates has been tweaked or customised.

Take a look at Diana's blog Pocahontasia [Sadly Diana's site is no longer operational] to see an example of some excellent work modifying the andreas08 template for her needs. The colors have been changed from the original blue to red, and the header has been significantly expanded to make room for a rotating image. Also, a new background image has been added to the main content so that a red gradient sits behind the sidebar. I love this design and obviously a lot of thought has gone into making this design work for Diana.

The next site, Brannekes Online, uses the artisitic template and whilst most of the original work has been left alone, the simple act of changing the header graphic seems to make the design look totally different. Also this is a multi-author site which you don't see very often.

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

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.

I've been experimenting with the new theme configurator for Serendipity. I'm hoping most users will upgrade to version 1.1 of Serendipity once it reaches a stable state although being a realist I know this isn't going to happen overnight.

This means we may end up with a selection of new templates that are compatible with the theme configurator but cause issues for users with older versions of Serendipity.

The solution is to make Serendipity perform a simple check to see if the user has a compatible version of Serendipity installed, and then provide alternative code if they don't. Read More

A couple of days ago I showed a preview screenshot of my new template, Carl02, and I asked for opinions. It seems everyone liked the layout but weren't too happy about the number of colors, or wanted to be able to change the colors. It didn't seem like it was going to be possible to please everyone until I started thinking about how the theme configurator works. Basically its just a series of variables that can be called from within the Smarty code. The screenshot you see to the left shows how I've managed to configure colorsets for each major element.

The result is that a user can simply choose to have all four colors, or they can choose to be more conservative as the next screenshot shows. The 'About Me' box is still red and I need opinions, should I allow users to enable this or disable this, and should they be able to select a color for this. Personally I would want the 'About Me' box to be unique on page but... thoughts please?