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Blogging and being a Serendipity webmaster

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Serendipity Blog Software

This lens is all about Serendipity, also known by the acronym s9y, a blog engine that is designed to be simple to use and provide the maximum amount of functionalty without the hassle of having to know any programming. Download it here.

In fact Serendipity is so good, that templates or plugins can be be downloaded and then installed directly from the admin screen. No more using an FTP program to upload themes and mods to your blog.

Serendipity is a powerful blog engine used by many thousands of bloggers worldwide. The project is much smaller than other blog software so users are able to get support from one of the core programmers within only a few hours, often less.

Serendipity is also known for being secure. Bugs when they appear are patched very quickly.

Serendipity (s9y for short) is a blogging platform you install on your own hosting account. It is similar to Wordpress, and works well for multi-lingual websites and blogs.

Reasons to Love Serendipity Blog

  • It's the easiest blog system in the world to use
  • s9y organizes your blog entries for you
  • It's just meant to be with a name like Serendipity
  • s9y automatically downloads and then installs plugins (mods) and templates
  • Serendipity templates use Smarty code, much easier than php or xml to work with
  • Serendipity let's multiple authors share a single blog by default, each author gets their own username
  • Serendipity has a media manager that works just like Explorer or Finder so no need to worry about ftp to create folders for images, videos or podcasts
  • Serendipity has a spiffy java type thingy for moving sidebar plugins (widgets) around without having to know any HTML
  • Because your momma (or spouse) will love it when you have no reason to be angry with your blog

Favourite Reasons for Using Serendipity Blog Software

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No more FTP

Serendipity users never ever need to use ftp if th more...1 point

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Mobile Website Design London

Design for mobile devices now Magnon International more...1 point

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It Just Works

I think this one is self-explanatory, Serendipity more...0 points

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Smarty Templating

Why would anyone want to deal with XML or PHP base more...0 points

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We've Got Garvin

Garvin is da man! He knows everything, he makes Se more...0 points

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s9y works well with SEO

Yeah, SEO is a lot easier when you use Serendipity more...0 points

Installing Serendipity

Downloading and Installing s9y, our favourite blog engine

Building a website is really easy on some platforms, but like everything if you want a robust website that will grow with you, you have to accept that some complexity is going to come with it. You're going to have to learn how to install the CMS you want to use, but fortunately with Serendipity this isn't difficult because so many people have written tutorials;
Installing Serendipity on Rackspace
A quick intro to installing Serendipity if you use Rackspace. Assumes you already know how their system works
Softaculous Install
Installing Serendipity if your host provides the Softaculous script install software
Installing Serendipity Step by Step
An 11 step guide to installing Serendipity, including what to complete in the install screen
Installing Serendipity on Debian - Using the Source
How to make Serendipity and Debian co-exist perfectly

Get your own Serendipity powered blog

Serendipity Homepage
This is where you can download Serendipity and get help on installing and customising Serendipity
Serendipity User Forums
Join the Serendipity community, an active forum where users discuss installation problems, plugin development, templating, and are able to showcase their own blogs.
Latest Serendipity News
Check out the latest Serendipity news and subscribe to the feed.
Serendipity Users Directory
A free directory for Serendipity users to submit their site and show off their skills as bloggers. Example Serendipity wesbites.
Get Your Free Serendipity Blog
Supersized is a free Serendipity blog hosting service, simply sign up and start posting, how easy is that?

Make blogging EASY

At its most basic, s9y allows bloggers to write their posts, select a category for the post and click save which publishes the entry to their blog. Bloggers can select how many entries are displayed on the start page, from one to any number.

Serendipity Plugin Management Screen
The image above demonstrates my favourite reason to use Serendipity, the plugin management screen - watch my video, managing Serendipity plugins to find out more. Check it out, one click tells you if any of your plugins need to be updated, and clicking install makes it happen. Not happy with a plugin on one side of your content? No problem, just move it to the other side, or hide it if it isn't needed. Want to add a plugin, simply click the install link and voila, a list of all plugins ready to download and use.

Categories are easily setup, and can be grouped to make it easy to find posts. When readers subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, they can choose to subscribe to the complete feed or individual feeds for categories.

A major benefit of Serendipity when writing posts is the split nature of entries. In the administration screen two text boxes are available, the main entry, and then an extended entry that only gets displayed when the entry link is clicked.

Multiple authors are supported without installing any mods or plugins, meaning families, groups of friends, or projects are able to start a blog and everyone can be given their own login. Administrators can choose to give authors restricted rights or any rights considered necessary.

Bloggers whose language isn't English will also find that all core functions have been translated into many languages such as German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Bulgarian, Russian, Farsi, Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Danish, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Arabic, and others.

If like me you blog professionally, you should find that Serendipity is an excellent CMS for adding AdSense, or other monetization methods. Serendipity works out of the box with techniques covered in most make money online ebooks

Blogging Books

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Quick Expert Poll

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Serendipity is very easy to use, but can also be tweaked to do some quite amazing things. In fact some users see it as a good intermediate CMS.

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Differences Between Serendipity and Wordpress

Blogging is fun with the right platform

The most obvious difference between Serendipity and Wordpress is the size of their user base, which does affect the number of templates and plugins available, and has a direct impact on the future growth of a platform as more people here about the bigger of the two and choose to work with it rather than buck the trend.

Serendipity suffers from this same problem, but interestingly, some of the most ardent users of Serendipity have been using the script since the days when Serendipity was technically superior to Wordpress. In Germany and the UK there is a small but thriving community of web developers who continue to use Serendipity, mostly because of the integrated Smarty programming language used in templates and plugins.

Personally I continue to use Serendipity for multi-lingual websites because Wordpress just doesn't support these well, and the next best option is Joomla which I find to be very painful and overly complex; especially for small business users.

Perhaps the biggest reason to use Serendipity though is the slower updates that mean you have the chance to use a version of Serendipity and feel secure your site won't be subject to exploits or security breaches as much as Wordpress. As a developer of websites I appreciate a script that is more stable, or more to the point, has less spammers and hackers trying to attack it.

Blogging with Keywords

Using keywords to rank your blog posts

Blogging KeywordsQuite a few Serendipity bloggers want to know how to attract decent search engine rankings for their websites, and the great news is that our blogs are automatically search engine friendly right from the start, so the real issue is how to capitalize on that.

It doesn't matter what your reason is, choosing keywords to use in your posts, static pages, or in the category and tag names are important. Serendipity's tag plugin is quite powerful, making it the ideal solution for keyword rich URLs. But you may wish to position the tags plugin at the top of your sidebar to maximise the effect.

You should also install the HTML Meta-tags plugin to make sure that all titles and descriptions for pages are perfectly optimized for the keywords you choose.

And that brings us to the most important point, how to find keywords for your Serendipity blog. Like most websites, a blog isn't much different from a shopping cart or static webpage, the difference is that posts are ordered by date instead of topic, though categories and tags go some way to reducing this difference.

Brainstorm your keywords first, what you should be thinking is that the average person who finds your blog is probably not going to think the same way as you, so ask friends, if they were looking for information on a particular topic, what would they type into the search engines? This is the key for you, structure your blog posts so that your keywords reflect what people type to find you. Learn more about choosing keywords from an SEO expert.

Serendipity also has a nice little plugin that shows your readers other posts that are related to the one they are reading, and this uses the tags plugin to identify which posts should be displayed, and again if keyword rich titles have been chosen you get a double whammy in the search engines.

Sample websites using s9y

Most users simply use Serendipity as their personal blog, however it is also possible to use it for business purposes, photoblog, or complete CMS.

By adding extra plugins, a basic muti-user blog is turned into a full featured website.

Business Use
Finca RetamaMost users who want to use Serendipity for business use create a customised template, then add the static pages and contact form plugins. Tweaked properly these give the appearance of a standard HTML website but using the power of the Serendipity engine to make editing page a snap. Finca Retama is an example of this.

Vindon HealthcareA publicly listed corporation, Vindon Healthcare PLC also use the Serendipity engine to manage their website, but in this instance they make extensive use of more than just static pages, they also use the blog part for news about their company, and interestingly, they use a sidebar widget to showcase their stock market listing.

Group Blog
FeudeneA great looking theme for a social site located in Feudenheim, part of Mannheim in Germany. In addition to the blog, this site also sells merchandise and operates a forum for residents of Feudenheim to share gossip and info about sport, entertainment and parties.

People Who Write About Serendipity (s9y)

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Tutorials on Using Serendipity Blog

Read user reviews and guides on using s9y.
Carl's Theming Tutorials
My own tutorials for users wanting to theme Serendipity to their own personal needs. I also wrote a 6 part series on converting a wordpress template to Serendipity
Make blog owner's comment stand out
Robert talks about making his own comments in his blog stand out from other readers. This makes it easy for blog readers to see his replies to other comments.
s9y with lighttpd, PostgreSQL
A quick tutorial on configuring Serendipit to run on the lighttpd web server using PostgreSQL as the database, on an Ubuntu powered machine.
Using Serendipity with Nexcess Hosting
A tutorial from one of the specialist Serendipity hosting companies on setting up s9y on their servers.
Adding Hijri dates to Serendipity
A great tutorial for Muslim users of Serendipity who want to use Hijri dates for their blog entries.
Embedding Flash Videos in Serendipity
A very quick, but it this age of video blogging very important tutorial on embedding Flash movies into your Serendipity blog entry.
Serendipity Help, Deutsch
A selection of videos showing how to install Serendipity and use plugins.
Using URL rewrite with lighttpd
Zac has successfully used URL rewriting on his s9y powered blog running on lighttpd instead of Apache. His rules are here.
search engine optimization tips
SEO advice for bloggers on writing compelling articles, link building, SEO visibility, keyword research, page names, using sitemaps etc. Site managed by Paul Dillinger, a Costa Rica based SEO expert.
Improve SEO with the Meta Description Plugin
This is a great plugin for making sure every entry on your blog has it's own unique title, metatags and description, which will improve your search engine placing.
Code highlighter plugin for entries
Add HTML code samples to your entries and use this plugin to color code the tags.
s9y The Missing Handbook
This is a Google translation of the Missing Handbook written by Kristian aka isotopp. A very good article covering the basics of using Serendipity
EasyFunk's Guide to Migrating from Wordpress to Serendipity
This is an excellent German language resource for any new s9y user and details step by step how to migrate from Wordpress to using the increasingly popular Serendipity

Serendipity Templates

Serendipity templates (themes) are freely downloadable for users of Serendipity, and are coded using Smarty, making them quite different from other blog templates.

This is a list of Serendipity template designers who have created themes for free download to be used on your Serendipity (s9y) blog.
Carl Galloway
Carl is the template designer responsible for the default Serendipity template and the new 'Affiliate Template'. I've also produced many ports of popular HTML templates such as andreas08, Hemingway, Internet Market, andreas09, andreas06, 1024px, andreas00, Be Nice, and many others.
Bulletproof Framework
The bulletproof template was created as a framework for future designers to customise their template without having to get involved in knowing any HTML or Smarty.
Dave's Themes
Dave is a contributing designer to the Bulletproof framework and has also produced a number of templates under his own name, including Coffee Bar, Square, Matrimony and others.
Reinhard's Ports
Reinhard has ported a number of very attractive templates to Serendipity, the most popular being iTheme and Envision.
Christian's Themes
Christian has produced a few great templates for Serendipity including the awesome TerraFirma and Transparency themes.
Abdussamad's Templates
Abdussamad has produced some beautiful templates, some of his own design, and some that are ported from open source HTML templates, such as Freshy.
Bexology Templates
Bex has produced two great templates with her own artwork, these are original and Bex01 is very popular.
Adaptation
The Good Guys have released two templates for Serendipity, Adaptation and Breathe2007.
Yellowled's Templates
One of the Bulletproof designers, Yellowled has also released some templates under his own name, as well as porting the Zenlike template to Serendipity.
Rainer's Templates
Rainer has produced some fresh looking templates with his own artwork.
Solar Flare Template for Serendipity
Ported from Mambo, this is a nice looking template for s9y, and don't forget to check out Rob's Serendipity plugins as well.
Costa's Themes
Costa has designed two very attractive templates for s9y, both of which are available for free download.

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