Goblin Introduction

Goblin is a static blog generator I made for my personal blog.

The problems I want to solve

1. To have a static personal blog, can easily setup, maintain, can possible run for decades.
2. Can safely and easily modify the content of the blog.

A static file generator was the first solution that came to mind, as it seemed to meet all my requirements in a straightforward manner. To sustain this blog over a long period, having complete control over the software is essential. After several iterations, I developed what I believe to be the simplest and cleanest design.

My solution

1. Use Markdown as the source format for blog posts

Markdown is incredibly simple and user-friendly, with numerous online and native tools available to create and modify Markdown files. In the near future, I plan to use Github as my blog editor. This setup will allow me to create, read, update, and delete my blog posts directly from a Github repository. My blog will then sync automatically. Github’s user interface provides easy blog management and convenient HTML conversion.

Edit in Github web:

2. An app written in Golang

golang is very suitable for this use case. At this point, it’s only 449 lines of go code.

find . -name "*.go" ! -path "./vendor/*" -print0 | xargs -0 wc -l

  17 ./config.go
  85 ./file_helper.go
  25 ./markdown_blog.go
  73 ./sitemap.go
 101 ./post.go
  40 ./main.go
  62 ./models.go
  46 ./pages.go
 449 total

3. A standalone Blog Repo

All my blog posts and other static fils(index.html) all lies in the repo Goblin Den

4. A script written by ChatGPT for sync

ChatGPT is at least of the god for script writing, I can effortlessly write a script doing some non-trivial job, for example, periodically sync folder from remote git repo, and generate my blog posts. fire-ball.sh