There’s a lot of confusion about this so let me try to explain it better here. I just tested this with Hitchens and it worked well for me:
- Install the Hitchens theme plug-in from the directory.
- Create a new theme: Design → Edit Custom Themes → New Theme. Call it something meaningful like “Hitchens Colors”.
- When creating the new theme, do not clone anything. Just give it a name.
- Set your blog to use your custom theme.
- Edit the theme and you should see the Hitchens templates appear in the list. Click on style.css to edit it.
- When you save your changes, Micro.blog will create a new copy of style.css. Updating the plug-in later will not change that copy.
This essentially tells Micro.blog that there are 2 “bundles” of templates: 1 for the Hitchens plug-in (with all templates), and 1 for your custom theme (with just style.css).
Let me know if you have any questions or if anyone is seeing something unexpected.