Austin's Blog

Intro: My Descent Into the Rabbit Hole

I've started writing a custom blog site generator, for better or worse. Here, I'd like to live-blog my development process and log what I'm working on and why.

Starting out, I'm using the Go programming language. I chose Go for a few reasons, mainly that it's really easy to create a single executable across platforms (important for me, since I'm running a Macbook with an M1 ARM processor as well as x64 Linux on my desktop). It also has a lot of the tools I'll need out of the box, including HTML templating in the standard library.

Why not use an existing site generator, like Hugo? For the most part, it came down to documentation. Hugo's documentation is scattered and not very well-organized and it's hard to find what I need. I especially had problems finding any sort of documentation or introduction to the templating system that Hugo uses and how it's set up, or documentation on the theme system. It may exist, but when I was digging through the Hugo docs, they were hard to follow and I couldn't find what I needed.

This also scratches an itch for me. I've wanted to build a page generator of this nature for a while, especially for my own sites. I imagine it's like my brother with his car -- sure, it can be fun to drive a car that's fast and powerful directly from the factory, but eventually, you want to get under the hood and mess with it yourself to make it yours.

So that's where I'm at. I'm starting by creating a program to translate this markdown to HTML, then I can start to think about how to serve those files and where to host them. Then RSS, then tagging, then metadata, then...who knows?

Stay tuned for more!