Blogs hosted on Micro.blog provide a lot of flexibility with custom CSS, themes, and Hugo templates. But if you are making major changes to the design of your blog, you may not want to do that live and risk breaking anything for your site visitors.
I often test out changes on a 2nd fake blog I created on Micro.blog. It’s like an extra sandbox that I can play in to edit templates without touching my real blog, and it’s useful enough that I want everyone else to be able to do the same thing.
Micro.blog now lets you create a free test blog for your account with a URL like username-test.micro.blog
. There’s a button to create the test blog under Posts → Design → Edit Custom Themes. It will appear as a free 2nd blog on your account, and you can post to it, upload files, or try out custom themes.
Because custom themes on Micro.blog can be shared across multiple blogs, when you’re happy with any changes you’ve made in your new theme, you can assign the theme to your main blog and all those changes will be applied to both sites. I’ve also added a “duplicate” option that makes a new copy of the theme so you can edit templates in the duplicate theme on your test blog.