Blog rewrite, this time in Go! Link to heading
Some time after re-launching my website, which was a complete rewrite from Perl to Go, and 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 which 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 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 can 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 with 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 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.