What This Is About Hand write, raw Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and make a webpage during the worldwide event, held in early August each year. Read HTML Energy’s Goals page to learn more. How to Participate Visit HTML Energy and go to the Events page to see if your area is hosting an event (it’s free). Bring a device, write some code, meet some cool people, and build something on the web! What will you build? But I Don’t Have a Website Yet If you don’t have a site yet, you can still participate! You can write HTML in a plain text editor, but it is nice to have some syntax highlighting (colour coding of the different parts of code). If you don’t want to download any software, you can use the in-browser editor provided by HTML Energy that shows a live preview of what you’re doing. Quick Start Guide If you are okay with downloading a code editor / integrated development environment (IDE), I recommend VSCodium. You can work on the code locally on your computer, have all the modern conveniences of code completion and syntax highlighting, and use an extension such as Live Server by Ritwick Dey. Open VSCodium, and create a new folder on your computer, e.g.: ~/Documents/html-day-2026 Make a new blank HTML file with File > New File (or right click in the Explorer panel): ~/Documents/html-day-2026/index.html Create a CSS file for custom styles if you want: ~/Documents/html-day-2026/styles.css If you page will contain images, create a folder for it: ~/Documents/html-day-2026/images/logo.jpg Go to View > Extensions. Search for Live Server by ritwickdeyand install it Next, go to View > Explorer and locate the index.html created in step 2. Right click on the HTML file and select “Open with Live Server”, it will render your HTML webpage and display it in your web browser! Once you’re done with the Live Server, you can stop the server by View > Command Palette > Stop Live Server To use a CSS stylesheet in your HTML page, add the following: <link rel="stylesheet" href="/custom.css"> To add assets like images, you can write: <img src="/logo.jpg" alt="Image of a green star."> My Setup I will be coding in my IDE of choice; VSCodium (an open source version of VS Code) and deploying the “special” page to my site here on BurgeonLab. Hugo Specific Modifications Because this site is built with Hugo, a static site generator, I had to create some custom templates to allow creation of plain HTML pages. (I will add a link to the guide when it is available.) Learning Resources Here are some links I find useful: Semantic HTML | MDN Using semantic HTML elements to identify regions of a page | W3 WCAG2.1 HTML Techniques | W3 HTML Cheat Sheet | Geek For Geeks Getting started with HTML | W3 HTML How To | MDN HTML References | MDN Creations HTML Day 2026 This is my first year participating in this event. See my RSVP for details and link to the virtual event. I created a page that showcases my early poetry: Two Poems From Yonder. It was fun to use semantic HTML to display the poems as <blockquotes in <articles> and using <p> and <span> to control how the stanza and lines are displayed and spaced. CSS is used add some styles and colours. [For up-to-date content, visit BurgeonLab directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For topic-specific feeds, visit /subscribe. Thanks for reading my blog using a RSS reader!]