Taking The Plunge: Converting My Typepad Templates To Advanced

So, I had to finally clean up my Typepad templates for /Message. First of all, a week ago I created a new logo for the banner. Next, today, I braved the perilous crossing over to “Advanced Templates” — which means you can hack them a lot like Moveable Type templates (and I have had a lot of experience with those). But once you convert, you leave behind the easy-to-mess-with Typepad WYSIWYG template editing, so just before making the crossing I tweaked the colors and fonts. (I lifted the color scheme from a palette called “Breakfast in Santa Fe” by Clint Williams [pointer from Firewheel Design].)

The real push for converting? Its the only way to get into the guts of the HTML being produced by Typepad, and turning off the various RSS feeds being put into the metatags. I want to have people coming to the site autodiscover only the Feedburner feed, but SixApart does not provide a means to override the hardcoded RSS and Atom feeds.

Also, I now have the ability to fool with the templates and stylesheets at a basic level, but I haven’t done anything big yet.