I rebuilt this site from scratch in Go

This site used to run on Hugo. It was fine, but publishing meant editing Markdown, rebuilding, and pushing files. I wanted to write a post from a browser, hit save, and be done. So I wrote my own engine.

The stack

It's a plain Go server, no framework doing the heavy lifting:

• templ for HTML templates, compiled to Go so mistakes are caught at build time.
• HTMX for the few interactive bits — live search, the comment form — instead of shipping a SPA.
• SQLite for storage, with FTS5 for full-text search over posts. One file on disk, trivial to back up.
• goldmark + chroma to render Markdown and highlight code on the server.

Everything — templates, CSS, the htmx script — is embedded into one static binary. No cgo, so it cross-compiles cleanly and drops into a FROM scratch-style image.

The admin side

The reason I wrote a backend at all: there's an admin panel. I log in, write a post in Markdown with a live preview next to it, upload images, and publish. Projects and comments are managed the same way. Comments use GitHub OAuth so I'm not moderating spam by hand.

Running it

The binary sits behind Caddy, which handles TLS. It runs as a container on my VPS, and a GitHub Actions workflow redeploys it on every push to main after the tests pass — git pull, rebuild, restart. Pushing a commit is the whole deploy.

It's open source

The code is on GitHub: meanii/aniicrite.dev. It's MIT-licensed, and I tried to keep the personal bits (identity, socials, content) in config so anyone can run their own copy without editing Go.