CrowderSoup

A website about technology and life.

Aaron Crowder avatar

Aaron Crowder

Hi, I'm Aaron Crowder. Or—if you know me online—CrowderSoup.

Father of two, Software developer, and lover of the open web. I like to take things apart (and sometimes even put them back together). I can frequently be found tinkering with some bit of code in my spare time.

Pronouns: He/Him, They/Them

Code is cheap, engineering is expensive.

I don't care how good your AI tools are, you still need good engineers!

Aaron Crowder
  1. screenshot of a web-game I'm making
    Pardon the roughness, but I'm more focused on making the game basically work first lol
  2. screenshot of gardn.website
    The current state of Gardn
  3. screenshot of note publishing
    The Gardn's note publishing UI

I think it was James of https://jamesg.blog/ who I first mentioned to a while back that I wanted to make a game focused on helping non-technical people build a website. Well James: here it is!

The Gardn is something I've been working on at https://gardn.website. Right now it's kind of like a bookmarking website that helps you save links and post them to your website (or Mastodon, if your website doesn't support Micropub).

Eventually The Gardn game will be the main entrypoint. If you don't have a website you'll be coached through creating one. The game will give you interfaces to enter URLs (your website, posts, etc.) to scan and save which will help you get seeds to plant in your garden.

Your garden is your space to cultivate. I'm not quite ready to show that yet! My vision is that you will be able to share a link to your in-game garden on your website. Visitors to your website can come to your virtual garden as a player to explore. My hope is that it's a creative space for webmasters as much as it is a way to help grow the #IndieWeb.

Aaron Crowder

I'm writing this note from within the web game I'm making to encourage people to make websites. If you're reading it then that means it worked!

Aaron Crowder

Blog Questions
Aaron Crowder

From Kev: Why did you start blogging in the first place? I had a website before I had a blog, but mainly because I didn't know what a blog was. The first incarnation of a blog though, that happened back in 2002-2003 I think! What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Right now I'm using Webstead, a home-grown CMS. It's built using Django because it was easy to rapidly prototype in my free time. Now It's grown into quite the large system! I'm currently worki...

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Some Webstead bug fixes I need to make
Aaron Crowder

I'm going to just start blogging things. What better place to start than with a post about the bugs I need to fix in my blog. How meta, right? Actually, I'm hoping that by posting these here I'll actually fix them this week some time. Bugs These aren't listed in order. I'm using an un-ordered list after all! Also, it's not exhaustive either. I noticed: - Dark mode contrast for the cursor location in admin editor needs to be increased. We can probably just change it to white from it's current ...

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If you've been following my blog and the things I’ve been building you might have been wondering the last few days where I've been.

Honestly I’ve been building so fast on so many things for a while now that I kinda forgot how to be a human. I went from working at a startup to not and ended up building an entire IndieWeb publishing platform for myself.

PADD and Webstead are fairly feature rich and stable. Gardn is really close and taking shape to be a great tool for link gardens.

I'm realizing that I actually need to just start using these tools. So this is me using PADD!

Aaron Crowder