Tutorials on using Serendipity Needed

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:24 am

I'm compiling a list of Serendipity tutorials to put onto an offsite list on another site, which will increase backlinks for your tutorial, and might even pass some valuable PR to your site.

What I need is for serendipity users who have written a serendipity tutorial to PM me or email me the URL of the tutorial. The tutorial can be in any language, or better yet, start translating existing tutorials into other languages and send my the link to these. My email address is carlgalloway [at] gmail [dot] com

DO NOT POST THE URL IN THIS THREAD, if you do, then all the hard work of getting an offsite backlink will be undone. Basically, if you post your URL here it will not be added to the offsite page. I currently own one PR7, two PR6, several PR5 and a few PR4 websites so I know what I'm talking about so please follow this basic request.

It's time to really seriously increase the profile of Serendipity, and my last contribution to this great software before I retire from the project is to get user numbers up into the millions. I'm sure everyone will be able to benefit from this.

Something to think about. Wordpress has now got so big that almost everyone is now producing sponsored templates and charging for plugins. The Serendipity project (which is free) could be the next Wordpress in terms of numbers of users.

Why? Because our favourite blog engine is still completely free, and we already have a fantastic free hosting service (supersized). Also, Garvin is working on the Serendipity book (in German) and this will surely help increase the number of German bloggers who start using Serendipity.

REMEMBER, DO NOT POST THE LINK TO THE TUTORIAL IN THIS THREAD, I DON'T WANT THE OFFSITE PAGE TO BE HIT WITH A DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY IN THE SEARCH ENGINES. PM ME OR EMAIL ME ONLY.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:26 am

Any more tutorials or other requests for the offsite page? Some of you should already be seeing it appearing in your visitor logs, it's already on page one of Google for selected keyphrases and on page 2 or 3 for serendipity templates so those of you who have written Serendipity tutorials or coded templates need to PM me when you find it.

BTW the page is only two days old. In about a week or so I'm going to start using it to aggressively target Wordpress and Blogger and see if we can improve the number of Serendipity users. So, come on board and email me.

DON'T MENTION THE PAGE ON THIS THREAD, IT'S IMPORTANT TO MAINTAIN THE MOMENTUM OF THE PAGE WITHOUT COMPROMISING IT'S SERP POSITION.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 3:40 pm

carl_galloway wrote:DON'T MENTION THE PAGE ON THIS THREAD, IT'S IMPORTANT TO MAINTAIN THE MOMENTUM OF THE PAGE WITHOUT COMPROMISING IT'S SERP POSITION.

Exactly why would showing a link to your site, or a link to the person's tutorial on this thread result in a penalty? Seems counter-intuitive as both your site, and the person's site containing the actual tutorial would both pick up an additional link.

And FYI - I have no idea which site you are referring to unless it is your own site identified in your signature, which seems to only contain your tutorials, not links to those written by others.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 5:05 pm

Nope, it's not my own site or the tutorials page on it, it's an offsite page, on a separate IP address. And thank you to the people who have been kind enough to email me URL's of articles/tutorials/template designers etc.

Don, I specifically won't be mentioning it here on these forums because I'm promoting it in other places to build it's PR and drive traffic back to the Serendipity community, the page in question is only one of several that are planned, but I need to get backlinks to the page from outside of s9y.org so that the links are one way to the wiki, the download page and these forums. Once it has it's own backlinks then it won't be buried in the SERPs, and then we can start talking about it here.

I've mentioned before that I will be fully retiring from Serendipity soon, Garvin is aware of my reasons why, things have not improved and this is my parting gift to the community. I'm spending some of the money I've made from Serendipity powered blogs on promoting the project.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 5:35 pm

Carl - I appreciate what you are doing.... I trust you did not misunderstand that. I'm just trying to better understand all this SEO stuff. You really seem to have a great understanding of it. I don't!!

I'm not asking you to expose the links before you are prepared to do so, I was asking "why".

Is the basic idea that you want that site to point HERE, and not the other way around?

I read your recent blog entry on seo stuff, and googling produces a boatload of info. Any particular resource(s) you found to be particularly beneficial/explanatory on seo?

Unfortunately, I have nothing to offer for material just yet. In the back of my mind is to one day write something up on styling the admin backend. I just have not had an opportunity to do it yet!! Too many irons in the fire!

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 6:00 pm

Is the basic idea that you want that site to point HERE, and not the other way around?

Yup, definitely, and I'd be happy to share the URL offline.

A tutorial on styling the backend would be awesome - I mean I could fiddle around for a few weeks and work out all the changes you guys made, but I think my site is already too much of an 'authority' on Serendipity, and we need more diversification within the SERPs. Frankly, any search for almost anything to do with Serendipity brings up the same 4 or 5 sites, whether you search for templates, plugin, tutorials whatever. If you do write a tutorial on this, post it on the bulletproof site or your own site, not here, and not in the wiki unless you create two separate versions that complement each other instead of compete with each other. Now if only we could get a few more people to produce templates/tutorials/quick howto's etc.

chickens · Post by **chickens** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 6:30 pm

If you have any ideas for how tos on the technical side let me know. I've been thinking about ideas but am drawing a blank.

When I first saw your post I thought you were just nuts for not wanting to link to it. I think I actually understand your logic now; dont understand SEO still, but does anyone besides Matt Cutts?

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 6:58 pm

Hi chickens,

An obvious set of tutorials I can think of are about using SQLite and PostgreSQL with Serendipity.

Also, anything to do with embedding Serendipity into other applications, or better yet, getting other applications (eg shopping carts, forums, directories etc) to embed within Serendipity. I know some of this might be template related, but if you work with the default template users can always ask for clarification about other templates from the template experts.

Getting Serendipity to work with external software like flock etc.

Yeah I know this is all stuff that might already have an answer in the forums, but most users don't actually do a search so we often end up answering a lot of the same questions all the time, but to be able to direct users to other sites, like your own where the answer is clearly and succinctly displayed... And as I said above, if you also submit the tutorial to wiki then make sure that your own tutorial is different. A good rule of thumb is the wiki should be the bullet points that tell people how to do something, then your tutorial tells them how a different way and also why.

Also, don't forget that Garvin is producing a German language book on everything to do with Serendipity, that means that the English speaking community might miss out on some things, see if you can fill in some of the blanks without competing with the book, it needs to be successful as well.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:00 am

I am fairly certain I found the site. Looks good. Now I just need to get a few of the current irons out of the fire, and get the new site I also have in development launched!!!

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 1:55 pm

@Don,

thanks, it's only the first of many sites, and apart from another two pages the rest will be on different domains. Feel free to digg, stumble, reddit etc. Feel free to link to it from your own site, but not from the bulletproof site just yet. Maybe in another 1-2 months. If you mention it to Dave and Matthias, make sure they also don't link to it from their sites, we want one way links at the moment. The biggest issue with the core s9y sites (s9y.org, my site, dave's site, the directory etc.) is that we all link to each other, which isn't bad, but we need to increase the gene pool for want of a better analogy.