Remember Windows XP?
If so, my new website at colortheorymusic.com will feel instantly familiar.
Color Theory XP features highlights from the Color Theory catalog disguised as a Windows XP desktop, complete with boot screen, login, taskbar, Start menu, draggable windows, and fake apps that play real music.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have thought that this was even possible, much less that I could do it myself.
I suppose that’s overstating things. I didn’t actually do it myself. I asked Claude to do it, and it was up and running in an afternoon.
Here is the actual prompt I gave it:
I, Brian Hazard, have a recording project called Color Theory and I want to build a new website that I’ll host at colortheorymusic.com, leaving colortheory.com to host my email. For the purposes of this task, pretend that colortheory.com doesn’t exist and just pull images and info online.
I want you to build a website that looks like a Windows XP operating system, with a desktop and file navigation and apps to click on. Make it fun with lots of easter eggs. Try to tastefully encourage people to join my Patreon page and include WinAmp that can play my songs. Also include Cubase VST that can load and play my songs.
Bada boom, bada bing, done.
I figured it would need PHP and a database and a special hosting package, but to my surprise, it didn’t require hosting at all. It’s just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that runs in the visitor’s browser.
Cloudflare, where I host my domains, has a Workers & Pages feature where you simply upload the files Claude spits out (a “deployment”), and they’re immediately live on the web with no monthly fee.
So I put it up and shared it, and it started spreading on social media! To capitalize on the momentum, I updated it to include my new single, “Couldn’t It Be Me?“
I rendered stems from Ableton so that they could be muted and soloed on a per-track basis in Cubase VST. Getting that to work took longer than everything else up to that point.
Ten separate audio files won’t stay in sync in a browser, so Claude made it download all of them up front, decode them into memory, and start them on one shared clock. On mobile it collapses the stems to mono at a lower sample rate to fit in memory.
As for traffic, Cloudflare reports 5,440 unique visitors in 30 days mostly from the US, UK, Netherlands, Brazil and Canada.
Is it an effective way to promote music? Who knows. Was it fun? Yes.
If you’re paying $20 a month for a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, you can do it too, though you might have to space out your sessions. You genuinely don’t need to know anything about coding or web design. Just tell it what you want in plain language.
My little demonstration video only scratches the surface. Feel free to play around to your heart’s content!
I had Claude prepare a full feature list, including every easter egg, in case you’d rather read than explore:
Spoilers: full feature list and easter eggs (click to reveal)
Feature list
The shell
- Boot sequence → XP-style welcome screen with three users:
- Guest — one click, straight in
- Brian Hazard — password-gated (a joke: “14,082 unread demos”)
- Patron — password posted on Patreon; turns off every upsell and unlocks bonus content
- Working taskbar (live clock, tray, window buttons), Start menu, Run… dialog
- Draggable, minimizable, maximizable windows with a real z-order stack
- Right-click the desktop → Change Wallpaper (4 wallpapers, including the XP hill)
- Turn Off Computer → “It’s now safe to turn off your computer”
- Idle two minutes with the music stopped → DVD-player-style screensaver
- Tray balloon tips that fire on login and after your first full song
Winamp (it really plays)
- 10 full tracks from the catalog, real MP3s
- Live spectrum analyzer, playlist, shuffle, repeat, seek and volume sliders
- The classic skin, rebuilt in CSS
Cubase VST — the centerpiece
- Loads catalog songs as fake
.allsessions: moving playhead, bar/beat counter, per-song tempo, VU meters - The real stem session for the new single “Couldn’t It Be Me?” — 10 actual stems (drums, bass, piano, synths, arpeggio, pluck, and more) exported from the master project
- Mute and solo buttons genuinely work. Visitors remix the song in the browser.
- The arrangement blocks are transcribed bar-for-bar from the Ableton project, so the timeline looks like the real session
- Period-correct joke: Brian tracked in Cubase until 2010, when he won Ableton Live in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest
MS Paint
- Working pencil, brush, eraser, fill, 20-color XP palette, three brush sizes
- Draws with touch on phones
- Easter egg: the new single’s cover art sits under a scratch-off layer — you reveal the artwork by scribbling on it
Explorer / file system
- My Computer, My Music (4 albums in detail, 14 in the catalog), My Pictures (cover art viewer), My Documents
- Napster Downloads folder — “totally legit”
- Notepad documents:
bio.txt,press_quotes.txt, and aTODO.txtthat shouldn’t have shipped
Internet Explorer
- A GeoCities-era Color Theory homepage: rainbow banner, marquee, visitor hit counter, “under construction” GIF energy, real links out to Bandcamp, Patreon and socials
A Different Drum (the deep cut)
- A replica of adifferentdrum.com, the Provo, Utah synthpop label and mail-order shop that sold Color Theory CDs in the XP era — rebuilt from a 2004 Wayback Machine snapshot, including the logo redrawn as SVG
- 20 CDs in the catalog: Color Theory’s six, plus Cosmicity, B! Machine, Faith Assembly and other label-mates
Patron features
- Patron Center — a parody of the XP Security Center (“Patreon Status: AT RISK”)
- Logging in as Patron unlocks all 18 Patreon CD volumes with complete tracklists; titles that exist on the site play in Winamp
- Patron login also silences every upsell — no Clippy, no balloons
Games
- Minesweeper — fully playable, with a flag-mode button added for touch
- 3D Pinball: Space Cadet — the actual game, via a community WebAssembly port
Guestbook
- A ’90s-style guestbook that’s really a mailing list signup, pitching five free songs including “Crystal” and “The Darkness”
Command Prompt
HELP,DIR(lists the songs, reports the total as “minutes of feelings”),PLAY 9(plays track 9 in Winamp),PATREON,COLOR,BSOD,CLIPPY- Undocumented:
FORMAT C:→ “Access denied: drive contains unreleased demos”,DEL *.*→ “Nice try.”, andPONYTAIL
Easter eggs
- Konami code → Blue Screen of Death (“A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your ears”)
- Clippy appears a few minutes in with a Patreon nudge you can decline
- Recycle Bin:
guitar_solo.wav(it plays!),major_label_contract.doc, andnu_metal_phase— do not restore - Napster Downloads → “Depeche Mode – Unreleased B-Side.mp3”, which tells the true Ponytail Girl story
Run…acceptsregedit(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ColorTheory\Feelings is protected) andtelnet towel.blinkenlights.nl- Winning Minesweeper reveals that “Ponytail Girl” was never a Depeche Mode song
Under the hood
- No build step, no framework, no dependencies — hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript: about 2,800 lines total, plus ~82 MB of audio and art
- Hosted free on Cloudflare (static assets)
- Works on phones and tablets: windows maximize, single-tap opens icons, Paint draws with touch, Minesweeper gets bigger cells
- The stem player decodes all 10 stems to memory and starts them on a single audio clock, so they can never drift out of sync — and it down-converts to mono on phones to survive the memory limits
If you’ve got any ideas for what I should do next, let me know in the comments!
