In recent years rachsmith.com has been an Astro static site, hosted on Netlify. Astro is awesome, and I would recommend it to anyone for creating a personal site!
I've been really enjoying using Go since we brought it in to the CodePen stack. I decided I wanted to run a site on my own Go web server where I had 100% control and could do anything I wanted.
So that's what this site is now. A Go binary, with a SQLite db, sitting on a Digital Ocean droplet, with Bunny CDN and Cloudflare for asset delivery and caching.
In terms of authoring, my posts still start in my Obsidian vault, and I've built another local Go web app that I use to keep the vault "in sync" with the posts on prod.
Even though it took an age to fully rewrite the site from scratch, I am loving this new stack. With Go, anything is possible. A cool example is the social card images for each note: they are just some Go logic rendering out a .png file - there's no need for a setup where a headless browser takes a screenshot of anything. The Go logic creates and serves the file, and it is cached by Bunny.
I will keep adding to the site and tooling around it. I would love to bring commenting back, but it's just such a PITA having to deal with and filter AI-powered spam 🫠. Next, I'm thinking I might build some sort of nugget-blasting mechanism which posts the same nugget on here, Bluesky and Mastodon.
Oh, and the rainbow flecks: I painted them myself in Procreate on the iPad, and then used them in HTML canvas. Daniel Shiffman's Nature Of Code inspired the "perlin noised" wave across the header. I wanted something that would be truly unique and personal to me, in a sea of same same Claude-designed websites. I'm pretty happy with where it landed 🌈.