Updating telnet.org again
This time with vibe designing and style
Background and Updates
Tonight, in a single evening, I reworked the telnet.org site. Thanks Cursor!
I’ve hosted the site for 25+ years now, along with a server, and kept it online the vast majority of that time. More recently the website has been pretty plain and dull.
With my new site generation system working (weave), and some experience making jinja2 templates with cursor and sonnet 3.5, I decided to take a shot at updating the telnet site.
I started by prompting it to make a pair of template files similar to this personal site. For the design I prompted for some variation of a cool site with the vintage feel of telnet and the terminal, explaining it was for telnet.org. This wasn’t a one-shot situation, but here’s where I started:
Along the way, I extracted and converted the existing site pages to markdown, using an online tool. From there I edited by hand and added all the metadata which I use for weave. This was all following the pattern established when I made this new weave system for this site.
I made a small change to my generator, so I could output with different extensions (htm vs html), since the telnet site has had the same urls for years and I don’t want to change them.
Things were working pretty quickly but there were lots of bugs to sort out with css. All the debugging took quite a bit of time. It also involved lots of iterating and lots of my monthly cursor fast requests. In the end it was mostly a mistake in using tailwind configs in combination with custom css style. Once I fixed it, the design came alaive and was both better and more fun.
Note: a lot of the bugs centered around how the css is created for the html generated from markdown. I probably need to learn more about that system and see if there are ways I could get it to leverage tailwind rather than custom css.
From there, things were more coherent and I enjoyed making small adjustments. After some more tuning, I put the site online. I am really pleased with both the results and the process.
Cursor and programming with AI is making tech fun again.
Before and After
Below are some before and after screenshots. If you want to take a look, here are some links:
