Thanks for trying to learn Discourse!
I understand it’s a learning experience, but I do have a question right off the bat: what is the difference between Hot and visiting /top to see what we think are top? You can filter it by week or even day if you like. That is supposed to be our “Hot”.
You might want to consider adding your route as part of the discovery. routes, like we do for latest, new, top, etc. Those routes already will render the navigation bar for you. I would suggest looking at discourse code to see how the other routes are created. They will have examples on how to fetch data for their lists of topics.