Caveat Lector

If you’re scared of your Movable Type templates, you aren’t alone. I hear that pretty regularly. So it only makes sense that experimenting with the templates that make up your live blog is Not To Be Thought Of until you’ve built up a little more confidence.

Fear not. It’s easy to make yourself a new template to use as a sandbox to play in. In fact, before we go any further I strongly recommend you do this, because we’re going to build a template from scratch, something you do not want to do on your main blog page.

Here’s how.

Click the Templates button on the left-hand button bar. (No left-hand button bar? You’re in the main menu. Click on your blog’s name.) You should see a list of templates, the main ones at top. Click on “Create new index template.”

You should get the same template editing menu you’re already used to from looking at your other templates, only blank. Name your template (how about “Sandbox”?) and give it a file to write to (try “sandbox.html”). Leave the “rebuild when rebuilding indexes” checkbox checked, and do not put anything in the “Link this template to a file” box.

Click “save,” and go ahead and rebuild (choose the “indexes only” rebuild option). That’s it. You’re done.

Where is the page that this (currently empty) template creates? In the same folder as your main blog page. If your main blog page is http://blog.example.com/index.html, your sandbox page is http://blog.example.com/sandbox.html.

What to put in the template… we’ll get into in upcoming posts.