Blog Rewrite

Blog rewrite, this time in Go!

Some time after re-launching my website, which was a complete rewrite from Perl to Go, now the blog piece is getting the same treatment. I have been writing in Go for three years now, and in that time there have been a lot of great write-ups about other services that are either being developed in or rewritten in Go. To someone like me, this is always good news.

Don’t get me wrong, Perl is a great language, but using it and the Catalyst Framework was too much overhead for what was needed. In my use case I was having to run Apache as a proxy server to redirect requests to a secondary web server, in this case it was Starman, that was running the Perl application. After the rewrite I was able to take all this down to one service, lowering the load on my server while at the same time speeding up response time.

While I wish that I had fancy benchmarks that could back up my claims or would be of interest, I did not get benchmarks of the old Perl version of the site. As previously stated, the version is built in Go, and with this rewrite, I decided to do some things differently. With this chance, one thing I decided to change was how posts are entered. Instead of entering posts in HTML, I have decided to enter data in Markdown and then use blackfriday package to convert the Markdown to HTML when a blog post is viewed. This gives me a way to quickly and easily write out a post while at the same time outputting clean HTML that will be viewed.