ChatGPT Refurbished My Website
November 2025
Hey, I’m state of the art, right? I know about artificial intelligence. I write about it. Readers tell me they enjoy my columns and are finding AI to be useful. (Even one reader who vowed to never use AI now uses it every day.)
But I’m also obsolete. My website jimkarpen.com had been an embarrassment for at least two decades. I had even stopped putting the link at the bottom of my monthly column.
Two things: 1) I hadn’t updated the code since I created my website in 1996. And 2) Who has a personal website these days?
In 1996 the World Wide Web was still new. Claris Home Page came out and made it easy to create a web page. Plus, it incorporated the new technology of tables. This was big. The earliest web pages were sort of like typewritten pages, with lines of text going all the way across the screen.
But tables let you divide up the space. My website had three columns: an archive list on the left, the main article in the center column, and some links to interesting web pages on the right.
This was so state of the art in 1996. At the time I was occasionally teaching workshops to introduce people to the internet, and I remember proudly showing my website.
I even put some Google ads in the right column and was making a little money for a while.
In a few years it was a dud. First of all, tables quickly fell out of favor for layout, replaced by “cascading style sheets.” I had no clue. So my tables remained.
Then smartphones came along. Jimkarpen.com wasn’t compatible with the smaller screen. That’s because it had fixed table widths, including a center column of 600 pixels, which by itself was too wide for a small display.
Google downgraded jimkarpen.com for this reason, making it less likely to come up in search results.
Plus, the internet had evolved. Blogs replaced personal websites, social media replaced blogs, and writers who had something to say developed a following, and also an income, by creating a presence on Substack and Medium.
And still there was the 1996-vintage jimkarpen.com.
Then I had an idea: use ChatGPT to redo my website! It would still be a bit of an anachronism compared to today’s website designs, but at least it would automatically adapt to the size of the display that was being used to access it.
ChatGPT seemingly embraced the challenge. I gave it my home page and it came up with a new, albeit basic, design. But more importantly, it replaced nearly all the old garbage code (e.g. tables) with modern code, including cascading style sheets. I liked the look, rudimentary as it was. And it was now more readable on my iPhone.
I would preview ChatGPT’s work in my web browser and see if anything needed to be different. If so, I’d simply ask ChatGPT to change this or that, and in a couple minutes it would give me a new version to download and preview in my browser.
There were, however, two instances where it did something wrong, such as having the article title appear twice, and wasn’t able to fix it. I’d keep telling it the problem, it would keep giving me a new version and telling me it had been fixed, and yet the problem would still be there when I previewed it in my browser.
So what did I do? I looked at the code using the free BBedit app. Each time I found a scrap of code from my old website that was causing the problem. Each time I showed ChatGPT the code and suggested it was the cause. And each time, ChatGPT said, “You’re right! That’s the problem. I’ll fix it.”
Perhaps what was most amazing was that every step of the way, ChatGPT would not only create something but then suggest the next steps. I was blown away when, having made a template for an archived article, ChatGPT said, “Would you like me to do a batch convert?” It was suggesting that it would redo my hundreds of archived columns in one step.
My website is still rudimentary. If I wanted something state of the art, I’d want to go with a content management system such as Wix. But that would run $200–$300 per year. Right now I’m paying $50 per year for hosting, $13/year for my domain name, and something like $35 per five years for SSL.
SSL stands for secure sockets layer. Which is yet another embarrassment. For years visitors to http://jimkarpen.com had been getting a message saying “Not Secure.” My web host and I finally got that fixed in mid-September.
So in this sense at least, jimkarpen.com is now state of the art. The URL begins with https rather than http.