Web Development on Townsourced Tech Blog

Choosing A Library to Embed Static Assets in Go

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 20:58:55 -0500

One of the oft-touted benefits of Go is that applications written in it are easily deployed because they are statically complied. A lot of this benefit goes away if you need to manage the location and permissions on a bunch of files needed to run a web application. The solution is to compile any necessary files into the application binary itself. This can be done in Go by using a byte slice literal containing the string representation of the bytes in a file.

Townsourced Open-sourced

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR: Grab the code here: https://github.com/timshannon/townsourced and run docker-compose up My goal with Townsourced was first and foremost to build something useful for local, small communities. I felt local communities were very under-represented online, and the social networks available catered either to large communities or niche communities of shared interest. My target audience was small, local communities: small towns, college campuses, neighborhoods, churches, schools. I wanted to build something that handled the overlap between those local communities better than existing options.

Anatomy of a Go Web App - Part 2: Authentication

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 19:05:51 -0600

This is part two of a set of posts breaking down some of the decisions I made when putting together the web server for townsourced. The first part is here.

Instead of a general overview, like part one, this post will focus specifically on User Authentication, i.e. how to handle passwords (if at all) and session management.

Anatomy of a Go Web Application

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 10:37:07 -0600

When building a web application from scratch, there are a lot of decisions to make. The goal of this guide is to give one more example of how you can go about building a web application in the Go language, as well as to give you an idea what things you need to start thinking about and plan for before you get started.

This guide is not intended to be exhaustive, nor is it absolute. It is a compendium of the things I thought about and how I dealt with them when building townsourced.com. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.