It has been over two years since I have moved my blog off of tumblr and wrote my own software to support it.

I have a couple of projects that I am writing services for using Go. If you haven’t heard of the Go language, you can check out the project from http://golang.org. The software stack for this blog is pretty simple. 

I ended up rewriting in Go from Python due to the high memory usage on a small VPS ( 512 mb ). I also decided against using any web framework ( primarily to learn the base Go language feature set ) and to use straight SQL ( I hadn’t written just pure SQL in years ). The results are interesting. Whereas django takes up anywhere between 100-150MB of ram, the go server is plugging along at roughly 8MB of memory. Using straight Sql I was able to implement features such as pagination and full text search without much difficulty.

So far features include:

• Custom metaweblog api implementation ( allows me to post using MarsEdit )
• Full Text search on article content and titles.
• Custom URL shortener.
• Page through all published posts, by year, year and month and all archived posts.
• Easy deployment ( cross compile the blog binary and upload it to the server and launch it ).
• Automatic image uploads to S3.
• RSS.

So far my experience with Go has been pretty positive and I will continue to use Go for new web/api projects.