Site Vision

7 September 2025

Tags: webdev

The Vision

So, I’m still playing around with hugo and learning the ropes (particularly theming and different folders’ purpose). I thought it would be appropriate to lay down a site plan (and document progress) as development will likely take a long time and it may help others.

I want this place to be a cute inviting place for me to share my fleeting interests and things I’ve learnt along the way.

Rough Design

Site Name

I like tails (Miles Prower) from the sonic series. I, weirdly, looked up to him as a kid. I loved the idea of being an inventor and love tinkering with things.

I use Linux Mint as my primary operating system as it does everything I need (games, creative things, and without bloat and spyware. It just works).

I thought maybe a blend of the two. So my tag was born (Mint Prower).

Layout

My layout is relatively simple.

I wanted to ensure there was enough space for my (lengthy) posts, but still some containers on the left for that neocity flare.I decided against another area on the right side for more boxes

Colour scheme

As for colour scheme, I initially tried to mix some colours involving linux mint (like a mint green), and foxes (because tails). Using some online swatch builder, I ended up with the below swatches.

I couldn’t get the mint green to wok, so I used the green slightly higher as an accent colour. I also added a cream (Hex Code: #f8f7e2) as the background for the main boxes.

I then mocked something up in penpot just to see what it would look like before I committed to anything. And, though incomplete, I was pretty happy with this draft so I tried to implement it.

Tools used

For completion, I ended up using Cloudflare pages for hosting (due to Cloudflare taking the initiative to combat AI bots), and Hugo to build a static site blog. Though I still need to do more research on AI bot prevention.

Tutorials used

I just needed a quick refresher on HTML and CSS, but to properly understand Hugo I followed the Quick Start tutorial and BIT-101’s tutorial.

If you’re looking to build a custom hugo theme, I highly recommend it BIT-101’s tutorial. It took me about a day to get through (got distracted a lot) but with the foundational knowledge it gave me, I was able implement my design in about 3 days (still in progress, but main bits done).

Afterthoughts and Next Steps

So, I chose poorly in deciding how to implement my flexboxes, but that’s for another post (if ever). It might have been better to use a grid layout instead, but I’m happy with how it turned out. The issue is also not enough to rebuild the site, so I’ll just leave it as is.

There is still a lot to do, some of the things I want to finish include:

• More random site gifs
• foxes around the border of the main content box
• Redesign the blogs page
• Finish the left hand boxes
• Add more neocity/90s web charm
• Redesign my blogs page (as it looks a little ugly but I’m not sure how to make it look nice)
• Redesign the navigation bar to match my initial design (or redesign it)
• Finish the contacts page so I can discuss things with others.
• Also it looks like I need to make some changes to the css for images, they are unconstrained.
• Make tags and dates look better on post pages.

I’m sure there are more. But, I want to take a break from it to dive into my billion other hobbies so I’ve decided to publish for now and keep working on it at a later stage (or at least start posting about my other activities).

Anyway, this was probably a long post, and I should come up with a signoff of some sort, but … Bye?