Screwed Again: Typepad Widgets

The folks at SixApart have announced Typepad widgets, which they define this way:

A widget is a piece of content or functionality provided by a third party that you can place in the siderail of your TypePad blog. Technically, it’s a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar content module on your blog.

Great! I have been using the current “Notes” form of Typelist in Typepad to allow me to embed my own widgets at /Message, like my eventful calendar, and various reformatted RSS feeds. But I have had some lumps doing that.

But then… the small print:

However, Widgets are not supported on blogs that use Advanced Templates, nor are they supported on Mixed Media layouts.

Yikes. But we all know that to do anything serious with your blog template you just have to push it to Advanced. For example, you cannot delete the metatags for various RSS feeds unless you promote the blog templates to Advanced, which means — even if you use a Feedburner feed — autodiscovery of RSS feeds at your blog will go to the prdefined feeds, not the feedburnerized one.

I am using Typepad because I don’t want the full-up hassles of MT or Wordpress — hosting, fooling a database, etc. — but there has to be something better that this never-never land of Advanced templates at Typepad, doesn’t there?