You can develop a blogspot template from local server by switching to a custom JavaScript-based template.
Here's how it would work:
- First, you set up the blog template to load the data into a certain format that can only be read by JavaScript. Think widget data like blog posts, link list, and the blog url. Your blog should have nothing to display in this state.
- Next, you download a page source, e.g. homepage or a specific post page. This page source contains the blog data you need to start developing the template locally.
- The downloaded page data is loaded into the page builder script in your local computer where you can start building the template to display the data.
- After finishing your template, you export the compiled template code and save it as a HTML widget in your blog. This is done for each page (homepage, post page, search page, etc.).
- Your blog, which have the same page builder script, can now display the blog data using the compiled template code.
🔷 Page Builder Setup
Clone tmpmachine/js-blogger-page-builder repository. I will use a commit specific links so that this post can be timeless.
git clone https://github.com/tmpmachine/js-blogger-page-builder.git
cd js-blogger-page-builder
# checkout to specific commit based on this blog post ..
# .. to make sure you can follow along.
git checkout c199284a338722d6c14c4b7fdaabe06c2c5a3a09Next, install dependencies (you need node.js & npm already installed) and start the server.
npm iFinally, to start the development server:
npm run dev
# or
node serverYou can now visit the development server on http://localhost:4200. Open example.html in the browser to see the example result. Also checkout the example.html source code and template-code.md for template writing guide.
So far what you see is the local development. What about the blog template itself? How can you format it to so that it became a data source that you can use for local development? We will touch that topic soon.
(To be continued)
***
This post will take a while to complete.
https://www.blogger.com/rpc_relay.html https://www.blogger.com/comment/frame/220561901913020919?po=1579248851048409229&hl=en&saa=85391&origin=https://xmlexpr.blogspot.com&skin=contempo https://xmlexpr.blogspot.com/2025/09/blogger-template-on-localhost.html#comments