by Rich Washburn
So here’s the thing. This entire page—this layout, this text, the green glow, the vibe of it booting up like an old DOS machine—it wasn’t hand-coded line by line. It was spoken into existence. No, seriously. I talked into a mic. A GPT listened. And it built this site. HTML. Clean. Simple. Fully alive. It didn’t start with some nostalgic brainstorm either. I was watching a random YouTube video—someone dropped a quick joke about NeoCities, and I paused. NeoCities? Had no idea what it was. Looked it up. Watched a different video right then and there. And that’s when I realized— This is basically a reboot of GeoCities. And that is where my very first website lived. That was it. The spark. Next thing I know, I’m back in that mindset again, but with totally different tools. Because here's what’s wild: I didn't go build this page in Notepad. I didn't write tags or troubleshoot line breaks for five hours. I just told my custom GPT what I wanted. And it built it. This is GPTHTML. Not a framework. Not a platform. Just me. Talking. And the machine making it real. The words? Mine. The feeling? Mine. The code? Also… technically mine. But crafted by something I trained to get my style, my rhythm, and my slightly obsessive need to make everything feel just right. It still blows my mind. Back in the day, I spent forever writing HTML. No libraries. No shortcuts. Just straight code, eyeballing every and , refreshing endlessly to fix one stupid misaligned pixel. I learned a lot that way. Like the fact that I’m not built for contact lenses. And that you can, in fact, burn out your retinas at 3am trying to align a nav menu. But that’s what we had. And we loved it. Fast-forward to now, and I’m making NeoCities pages again—same basic HTML bones—but instead of typing? I just talk. I riff. I say things like: “Make this feel like an old syslog dump from 1996.” “Make it boot up like a terminal.” “Wrap this line in because it hits harder.” And boom—done. Like magic. But earned magic. Because everything behind this still started with the same core desire: I want to make something. And the really cool part? Anyone can do this now. There are so many NeoCities pages out there where people are learning HTML the hard way. And honestly? Mad respect. That’s where I started too. But if you’re struggling? If you just need a leg up? Hop into ChatGPT and say: “Drop me some HTML, yo.” You’ll be amazed. This thing lives for HTML. It’ll help you structure, format, fix, understand, tweak—whatever you need. And yeah, okay—technically this page has a little JavaScript under the hood, a bit of CSS to make it glow. But at its heart? It’s simple. It’s clean. It’s HTML, the way I remember it—reborn in a way I never saw coming. This is GPTHTML. It’s what happens when 90s hand-coded energy meets 2025-level voice-to-web sorcery. It’s how we go full circle—and somehow forward at the same time. If 14-year-old me could see this? He wouldn’t ask how. He’d just say: “Dude… this is awesome.” >_ C:\RETRO\GPTHTML\> RUN /GPTHTML.EXE Prompt received. HTML compiled. Soul online.