Serendipity Review

Trackbacks And Pingbacks

Bloggers and website authors will be able to discover a very powerful feature of Serendipity which is its capability to accept, send, and automatically detect trackbacks and pingbacks. But what are trackbacks and pingbacks? These are actually ways by which bloggers and website authors are notified when another blogger, author, or anyone else links to one of their blog posts or articles, and when they react to someone’s blog post or article.

A trackback is used when someone wants to comment about a blog post or an article written by a blogger, or wishes to write something related to such blog post or article on his or her own blog. Here, a trackback is sent to the author of the blog post so he or she will be able to find out what that person has to say about the blog post.

On the other hand, a pingback is a method applied when someone writes a blog post or an article that contains a link to another website. That website then receives and enables a pingback to get a notification. The owner of the website also has the option to have a link to that particular blog post or article be displayed on the website. With trackbacks and pingbacks, Serendipity users will be able to receive notifications when they make comments on articles written by other authors, or when other bloggers link to their own articles.

Customize Blogs With Plugins

Serendipity also boasts its robust plugin system which allows bloggers and developers to modify the features and functionalities of the weblog engine so they can manage the content of their blogs better. It has an online plugin repository known as Spartacus which makes it easy for bloggers to fetch, install, and manage the plugins they need to customize their blogs. Among the powerful plugins that it offers are those used for maintaining static page content, displaying galleries, and making a customized template view.

Robust Editing Interface

The weblog engine features a robust editing interface which lets bloggers easily prepare content for their blogs. This interface permits them to use different markup languages such as Textile and Markdown – lightweight markup languages that allow the writing of easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text, and converts it to structured HTML. Also, the interface has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

Fight Spam

To wrap it up, Serendipity provides anti-spam filters. As an example, bloggers can fight spam in comments and trackbacks using Honeypots and Akismet. Honeypots is a computer security mechanism that is used to detect and combat unauthorised use of information systems, while Akismet is a spam filtering service that performs spam checks on comments, trackbacks, and contact form submissions. They will also be able to apply word filters, as well as employ a full moderation.