This is the first post on lostsgnl.com. The site is built with a custom static site generator written in Go, and all content is authored in Markdown.

Why Build a Custom SSG?

There are plenty of static site generators out there — Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy — but sometimes you want something that does exactly what you need and nothing more. No plugins to configure, no themes to wrestle with, no YAML config files that span hundreds of lines.

This generator does one thing: it takes Markdown files and turns them into clean HTML pages. That’s it.

What You’ll Find Here

I plan to write about:

  • Software engineering — Go, systems design, the craft of building things
  • Technology — tools, workflows, things I find interesting
  • Miscellaneous — whatever else comes to mind

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain

The colour palette that inspired this site’s design

The Stack

The site runs on a few simple pieces:

  • Go for the static site generator
  • Markdown for content
  • Netlify for hosting
  • Modern CSS for styling — no frameworks, no JavaScript

Every page also serves its source Markdown file for AI/LLM consumption. You can find it at index.md alongside any page.

Code Example

Here’s the heart of the build process:

site, err := content.LoadSite("content/")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

That’s the whole content pipeline. Walk the directories, parse the frontmatter, convert the Markdown, collect the tags. Done.