Serendipity Forums

I have the Serendipity, but I could use someone with expertise to answer some very basic questions.

1.) Is there a "Hit counter" plug-in? I am convinced that no one ever goes to my site at all, he he.

2.) I can't figure out what plug-in to use to set up a "members list" that will automatically email someone when something new is posted.

3.) What the heck is a "Trackback"? Where do they come from, and how can I get rid of them, but still keep the comments?

4.) As a Godaddy client, I have an older version, and would like to upgrade, but don't know how.

5.) Is there an easy way to change the address? Instead of www.blahblahblah.net/serendipity, could I change it to www.blahblahblah.net/weblog?

I will gladly give out my secret password info, if a trustworthy tech can help me out. I'm a 51 yr old that didn't grow up using this technology, so there are some significant gaps in my knowlege. Like how to "ftp" something, to say the least.

Thank you.

im such a novice but i think i know 3 of your answers

ques 1: If you have go daddy as your host, you can upgrade Traffic Facts to give you more info on hits per day, vistors, page views etc. Also provides IP addresses of who's been stopping by and how much time each user spent on your site. i like to select 'Most Active Visitors' because it shows my visitors marked on a map of the world. It's like the movie Strange Brew when the evil guy said 'Light up the map'

ques 3: When you right click where it says track back it provides a URL to allows users and yourself to bookmark and refer to later. Like if you ever wanted to reference/link a certain discussion in another part of your website.

ques 5: changing the URL path to read weblog requires changing the the name of the folder in your ftp file. When you open your ftp you will see one that says serendipity. You would also have to change the paths listed in the configuration portion in the administration suite. If I were you I wouldn't change it because who knows how many codes that could mess up. I wouldnt mess with it.

There are no stupid questions!

I'm not sure about answers to all of your questions, but I may have solutions to a few:

1) There is an event plugin called Statistics that includes a visitor counter.

3) A trackback allows you to be notified when someone links to one of your posts. If you do not want this to show up, please read this article: http://www.s9y.org/11.html#A29

4) You can upgrade your s9y installation through ftp. This will involve downloading an FTP client, such as SmartFTP ( http://www.smartftp.com/ ). There are tutorials on the SmartFTP site on how to get started with this program. If you are uncomfortable trying this yourself, please feel free to send me a private message, and I will gladly help you however I can.

5] Changing the url will require FTP access (because you have to move files), and is explained in this article: http://www.s9y.org/11.html#A21

I hope some of this will help, and that it's not too overwhelming!

These answers are all correct thus far. To clarify on the Trackback thing, its purpose is to let you know when someone has linked to your article. It requires cooperation between your website and the linking website. The problem is that it can be used for spam: someone can claim to link to your article, and you put up his link in return. But if he never actually linked to your site, you just scratched his back for nothing!

You can do some configuration to eliminate trackbacks in the spamblock plugin. Just go to your Admin screen, "Configure Plugins", click the Spamblock Plugin, and enable "Check Trackback URLs". To stop both trackbacks and comments coming from outside your webpage, you can also set "Hot to treat comments made via APIs" to "reject".

For question 2: Serendipity doesn't include a mailing list. This is generally handled by RSS, nowadays; instead of a mail program, a user can be notified of new entries by an RSS reader. However, Serendipity does allow ONE email address to be notified when a new entry is created. That's the "Send entries via E-Mail" plugin. If you set up a mailing list on a free server elsewhere (such as Yahoo! Groups), and then configure the e-mail plugin to send to that address, you get a mailing list that sends new entries to all its subscribers.