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Typepad 101: Duplicating Designs

Welcome to Typepad 101! Whether you want to add some new features to your blog's design, or simply make your blog more functional, Typepad 101 has you covered. Topics covered in this series are suitable for bloggers at any skill level, as long as you're at Pro Basic or above. If you're at the Free Micro level and are interested in upgrading to put these tricks to use on your blog, you can upgrade your account anytime.

When you create a design for any blog in your account, the design is available to be used for any other blog in your account, and you can create copies of your designs. To see all the designs in your Typepad account, go to Blogs > (select blog) > Designs and scroll down to the list of Your Designs. There is no limit to the number of designs you can create, and you may have even more designs than you realized!

Any design in your Typepad account can be quickly duplicated and applied to another blog in your account. Why would you want to duplicate a design?

• Create a duplicate of your blog's design and apply it to a test blog to try out major or minor design changes without impacting your live blog. Check out the article on creating a test blog for tips!
• Apply a similar design to multiple blogs which are grouped together on your site.
• When creating a new blog, you can start with the great design you configured for another blog instead of starting from scratch.

To duplicate a design, go to the Designs list for any blog, scroll down to the list of designs, open the Actions menu next to the design you wish to duplicate, and select Duplicate.

After you duplicate the design, the Designs list will refresh and a copy of the design will be added. By default, the design name will start with "Copy of" followed by the original design name. You can change the name of the design at Actions > Rename.

What is the difference between the original design and the duplicate design? The duplicate design is an exact copy of the design when the copy is created. If you make changes to the original design after the copy is created, the copy will not be changed. Similarly, if you make changes to the copy, the original design will not be changed.

The same modules will display on both the original and copy. For the default modules - e.g. Archives, Categories, Pages - the modules will update with links to the content on the blog the design is applied. For example, if you have hundreds of posts published to the original blog the design was applied, the Archives module will display multiple links to the monthly archives, but if you don't have any posts published to the new blog the duplicate design is applied, no items will be displayed in the Archives module yet.

For the custom modules - e.g. Navigation Bar, Typelists - you may need to update links to your existing blog's content. For instance, the links in the Navigation Bar will not change to link to the new blog's home page.

Don't forget to check out the other Typepad 101 posts in the Tips & Tricks category.

Featured Shop: T.Party Antiques

Welcome to T-Party Antiques, where you can find antique, vintage and handmade goods for your home. Blogger Susan has an eye for finding hidden gems at flea markets and thrift stores, coming up with fresh, clever uses for these discoveries, and sharing them with you!

Featured Blog: Janet's House

NAME: Janet Brown
BLOG: Janet's House
TYPEPAD MEMBER SINCE: 2010
WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT: Janet has a background in all kinds of arts and crafts, including sewing, cooking, gardening, and lots more. Over the years, she's sewn for boutiques, crafted hundreds of handmade teddy bears, and created loads of gifts. On Janet's House, she imparts her expertise to her readers, sharing creative ideas and how-to projects to enhance your home, garden and life.

FOLLOW: Typepad | Twitter

Featured Shop: Amy Hanna

Blogger Amy Hanna has a passion for finding forgotten antique treasures and recreating modern jewels with a vintage twist. She loves to mix detailed beautiful objects with rough stones, raw woods and tarnished metals, creating jewelry that features hard to find, one of a kind treasures.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings and Happy New Year from all of us at Say Media and the Typepad team!

Click here for a special holiday greeting from SAY Media Canada!

Typepad Responds: When will we see new features released?

When will we see new features released?

We are always committed to bringing new features, as well as improvements for existing features, to Typepad. As it's the end of the year we're giving our engineers a much-needed break. Come the new year, however, we'll be hard at work on some exciting releases.

While we all wait for then, we thought it would be a great idea to share the excitement and let you know what to look forward to:

• themes to give your blog a fab new look for the new year;
• an update to the Aviary image editor; and
• some new...options...for the Theme Builder.

Being purposely vague aside (I don't want to spoil the surprise!), we know you'll be ecstatic to see these in action. Rest assured, we have other features, themes, and improvements in the work. While all seems still on the surface, we're all a bunch of ducks madly paddling our feet below it.

To keep the feet going, and the ideas flowing, we'd love for you to take a minute or two to fill out our Features survey. Doing so will help us to know what you would most like to see Typepad develop, and we can discuss and roadmap some items you care about into Typepad's future.

Brianna

Featured Shop: Oxford Impressions

From artist Suzanne Melvin comes Oxford Impressions, a shop offering artistic rubber stamps and collage sheets for creative souls. Perfect for the crafty folks on your list, Suzanne's shop features everything from ocean life to eclectic oddities to the alphabet and more!

Featured Shop: Elephantine

Rachel Ball creates gorgeous handmade, minimalist jewelery, perfect for anyone who loves modern design. Don't miss her jewelry of the month club, and give the gift that keeps on giving.

Typepad 101: Changing the Search Highlight Color

Welcome to Typepad 101! Whether you want to add some new features to your blog's design, or simply make your blog more functional, Typepad 101 has you covered. Topics covered in this series are suitable for bloggers at any skill level, but since this trick uses Custom CSS, you'll want to be at the Pro Unlimited level or above. If you're interested in upgrading to put these tricks to use on your blog, you can upgrade your account anytime. If you're at the Free Micro or Pro Basic level and are interested in upgrading to put these tricks to use on your blog, you can upgrade your account anytime.

We've been over this before; you want to fancy up your blog with some design changes, but you don't want to spend a lot of time working on it.  Today's tip is a way to make a change to your search results with minimal time and effort.

If you haven't already, you should first go to Design > Content and add the Search module to your blog's sidebar.

Next, go to Design > Custom CSS and add the following:

    .search-results .search-results-highlight {
      background-color: #c00000;
    }

The #c00000 hexadecimal gives you a red highlight, which changes the default background color of yellow to red. You can use any hexadecimal color you feel best matches your blog's design.

Before Custom CSS is applied.

After Custom CSS is applied.

If you don't know the hexadecimal color code of the color you want, then we recommend using your preferred search engine to search for "hexadecimal color chart." One such site is the W3Schools' HTML Color Chart.

If you're feeling really adventurous, you can find some additional search CSS changes in the Knowledge Base.

Featured Shop: Brave Mabel

Shop owner Amy Collins creates original illustrations and injects her snarky, quirky sense of humor into her Brave Mabel line of greeting cards and archival prints. Make sure not to miss her fantastic moleskine notebooks with original hand-drawn cartoons - and custom requests as well!