A deep dive into how the Gopher graphics and logos are created for my programming courses.

My Go blog has a way to render individual posts, but it is still missing metadata about each post. Information like the author of the post, when it was published, etc. In this part of the build a blog series we focus on adding frontmatter so that we can properly render this for each blog post, but also in preparation for when we want to show a list of all of our blog posts.

Now that our blog can render plaintext markdown, I was ready to start converting the markdown into HTML and rendering it nicely. The first step was to find a markdown processing library and start using it. After that I added code syntax highlighting, and finished up with an HTML template so I could render a navbar and other common elements on every page that shows a blog post.

The first step I took when building my Go blog was to setup a simple HTTP server that can return the slug of the blog. This is a unique identifier for the blog that is a bit more url-friendly. From there I worked on the code necessary to read files from the local disk and started rendering the raw markdown to the HTTP handler in preparation for the next part of this series where I will start rendering the markdown in proper HTML.

In this series we work through building a blog in Go. The first article helps set the scene by explaining what we are going to build, what to expect from the series, and provides some suggestions on how to break down the problem and proceed if you want to try coding it on your own first.

This week someone in my Go courses Slack asked why their for loop wasn’t working the way they expected. More specifically, they were wondering if Go’s range keyword was copying their slice before iterating over it. I won’t use the exact same code here, but we can look at a similar example by trying to generate the Fibonacci sequence. If you don’t know what the Fibonacci sequence is, don’t worry.