I always wanted to have a personal site — a place for idea dumps and a blog. But I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole of tool after tool: OpenClaw, lots of subscriptions, and so on.
What I decided to do instead: open a pi agent on a Linux VPS, connect it through Telegram, and build the site on the go. No extra services, no complex pipelines.
Less context, more focus
At first, pi was working fine — until the context grew large. Around 50% through, it started consuming lots of tokens with glm-5.2 because I was sending all the context again and again. Since I was on Telegram, I couldn't refresh from my phone. I just pushed through.
I tried compaction, but I'm not a fan. Having less context is better when you're prompting and building something new — the thread just gets deeper and deeper each time. So I SSH'd into the Linux VPS, prompted pi directly, and told it I wanted to start fresh sessions from Telegram. It extended the Telegram extension with a /new command: when the message starts with /new, it creates a new session and connects it to Telegram. Now I can start with a blank slate whenever I need to.
The tech stack
I only use Go. I wanted to learn what it's like to deploy on a Linux VPS — using systemctl directly to register my binary as a service. It was a really lovely experience. I scaffolded the code to get the basic structure I wanted, then set up a VPS and let the agent handle the rest with auto-search. I told it "only Go, please use Go" and it resolved things from there. I'll research these pieces more deeply later to make sure everything was done correctly.
I also got to learn about HSTS — it registers the domain so that browsers can't access it without a TLS-secured connection. A nice bonus from the process.
Content management evolution
I started with Markdown files in the repo itself, but that got complicated quickly. So I migrated to having a content directory on the Linux VPS that I back up manually from time to time. This gave me both persistence and ease of deployment — otherwise the agent had to juggle checking out from a repo, committing, and managing its own changes during development.
Later I discovered the frontmatter concept for Markdown files — a common way to store metadata like title, slug, date, and tags. This let me add search, listing, and post detail pages. While I was at it, I added the ability to edit and publish my writings directly from an admin page. Security is basic: a salted password stored in an environment variable. Nothing fancy — please don't hack me.
What's next
Now I have the capability to just log what I want to write and dump ideas. Building with simple technologies — just HTML, Go, CSS, and JavaScript — while texting with the agent on a Linux VPS has been a great experience. Whatever I build is directly deployed. No middleware, no other services. Just Linux, Go, HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
Looking forward to writing more here.