HTML Day 2026
What’s going on, Internet? Last Saturday was HTML Day, a yearly celebration of hand-writing HTML started by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Meetups happen in cities all over the world, and Zachary Kai ran an online session for those of us nowhere near one. Ten minutes of introductions, forty minutes of writing HTML, ten minutes sharing what we made. Zachary has a recap of the session up on his site.
I went in with a plan. At the recent Homebrew Website Club I talked about a question we hear all the time at the 32-Bit Cafe: “What should I put on my website? I don’t know what to put on my website.” These web surfers have the HTML and CSS basics down. Their homepages are full of badges, blinkies and custom cursors. What they don’t have is content. After thirty seconds of surfing I know nothing about the person behind the site.
So for HTML Day I started hand-writing a little zine about it: Grow Your Website. Forty minutes was enough to plant the first pages. I’ll finish the rest over the weekend and share the link once it’s online.
The method is one page and a way to grow it. You start with a seed: a title, a paragraph about who you are, and a bullet list of your interests. The intro grows into an about page. A bullet grows into its own page. The new page grows its own list, and every item on it is another seed. Repeat forever, because a website is never finished.
The zine needed someone to grow a site, so I invented PyRo, a webmaster from Aotearoa who works at a garden centre, has a cat called Savage, and listens to a lot of NZ hip-hop. PyRo’s site is the example the zine follows. When it’s finished you can click through the zine and watch it grow from one page to five. (PyRo was one of my earliest handles.)
PyRo has good taste too. The NZ hip-hop page covers the Years Gone By crew, the Zips (+++!) collective, and a few others. That list deserves a proper post of its own. More on that soon.
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