A couple of years ago, I decided it was time to return to the internet and establish a virtual presence. Having been removed from social networks for over a decade at that point, I found the current state of affairs somewhat daunting. I felt overwhelmed by the complexity and, frankly, much of the content I encountered wasn't to my taste. This was in stark contrast to my personal feed, meticulously curated over the years from a multitude of blogs. Simultaneously, I was trying to organize and give meaning to a vast collection of links, notes, and general content, often in Markdown format, that served me as a kind of external brain. It then dawned on me that I could hack my way back online by establishing a blog as a central hub for my content and sharing to social media from there; the content would come from this second brain and, as a bonus, this approach would compel me to organize this notes dump, potentially making this mass of notes useful to both myself and others.
With this goal in mind, I set out to investigate the best and most painless way to set up such a blog. After exploring existing solutions, I decided to build my own, first writing tentative scripts in Python, which quickly became unmaintainable. This situation called for a more robust solution, and I initially spent some time developing one in Rust. However, switching to Go significantly sped up the process, and here it is: the first, more or less stable, version of DSBG. I believe it boasts a good initial feature set, including RSS feed generation, automatic share buttons, themes, and more, making it completely usable (at least for my own use case).
Because I believe DSBG could be useful to others in similar situations, I'm releasing it under an MIT license, primarily to gather feedback and solicit help from the community for its further development. This very blog was generated using DSBG. DSBG is available at github.com/tesserato/dsbg.
