New banner! Thanks, TypePad customer service!

The customer service people at

TypePad continue to amaze me.  This is what, my third or fourth unsolicited testimonial to them and their product?  As I've said before, the software is great as is; but it's improving rapidly; and best of all, by far, is the quick competence of the customer service crew, who I feel like I'm getting to know almost on a personal basis.

I decided I was tired of plain old text in the "banner" at the top of my blog.  I didn't know for sure what I wanted, but I wanted something new. 

TypePad makes posting a graphic for that purpose absolutely easy if you're using their many regular and highly customizable templates — check a box, navigate via a browse window to the graphic file you want to upload, click on the SAVE button. 

But I've long since gotten the tweakers' bug and have been messing with stuff which requires that I use "custom templates" — which are super-flexible, but require a bunch more patience, ingenuity, and/or programming skill.  Knowing some html is good, and I do; knowing some CSS (cascading style sheets, which is html on steroids) is better, and I don't (much, but I'm learning).  So switching to a graphic in one's banner with custom templates already in place is a leeee-dul bit trickier (although not nearly as hard in hindsight as I made it seem to be).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, about three exchanges with TypePad's cheerful customer service folks had me fixed up.  Voila, supra!  Super!  Did they say, "Hey, bozo, we're not your CSS instructors, go buy a book or take a course if you wanna be a website programmer"?  Nope.  Neither did they write the little bit of code I needed for me, either.  Instead, they gave me a couple of succinct pointers about how I could figure it out myself.  They taught me to fish instead of giving me a fish.  Or something.

I dunno whether I'll be as creative as Lileks is — he's got up a new banner graphic just about every week — but I might be, now that I know how it's done.  For the meantime, the planet graphic is something I picked because (1) it matches my color scheme, (2) it was easy to find, (3) it makes me think I'm seeming worldly (nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!), and (4) being that my blogging namesake is a conehead from Remulak, it seemed appropriate to start with a distant view of this crazy planet from some distance away, metaphorically, in the blogosphere.