Last month I setup a website, Howell the Night Owl, through a combination of Craft's new API + Netlify, all vibe coded through Google AI studio. It was a ton of fun and I learned a lot including rudimentary Github setup and deploys, something I had zero experience with before.

I got it to a good place with a Bento layout, rotating color scheme, and a newsletter sign up through Buttondown. Again, a fun learning process, especially seeing how far I could push Craft as a rough CMS.

All that said though, I've always loved Ghost CMS and also wanted to experiment with their latest version and see if I could create a template from scratch. This turned into another great learning experience, setting up a local Ghost instance and getting everything running for local testing. A little trial and error but now I can create, update, and test my template locally.

I started with Google Stitch, putting together some mockups using a pinball playfield as the starting point. The mockups weren't exactly what I was going for but I've been happy enough with the direction. From there, I pulled the mockups into a Google Antigravity project, gave it instructions, shared the mockups and was off to the races.

It's taken a lot of trial and error to get to this point. There are still some formatting issues, the website isn't mobile responsive yet, but it's good enough as a "build in public" work in progress. Signed up for hosting with Magicpages.co, the founder Jannis is super responsive and helpful, and now it's live!

I’ll keep experimenting with this template, seeing how far I can push it, and learning as I go. If you’re curious about the process, stick around. More to come!