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.
When my home server started talking back, the next question was obvious: could it work on my code too? Honestly, this was the part I was most nervous about. A bot that writes a bad note gives me a bad note. A bot that pushes code can ship a bug to my live site (or get tricked into doing something I'd never approve).
So this is mostly a post about guardrails. And about the pull requests that convinced me they work.
Read-only first
Before it could change anything, I wanted it to be able to read...
If you're reading this on my site instead of in a feed reader: hi, yes, it looks different. 👋
Honestly, the old look had gotten stale. It was the stock Webstead default theme with every setting left at its default. Cream background, orange accent, fancy serif headings. Nice! But it looked like every Webstead site, and I wanted mine to feel like mine.
So now it's a terminal.
What changed
A prompt for a header. aaron@crowdersoup:~$, with a blinking cursor (it stops blinking if your system asks...
Webstead, the CMS that runs this blog, now has an MCP server built in. As of this morning it also does OAuth, so I connected it to Claude like any other connector. No API keys pasted anywhere, just a normal "log in and approve" flow.
The MCP server landed in #147 and the OAuth bits in #148.
What it can do
Claude can now:
Search and read my posts
Write drafts and hand me a preview link that works logged out
Upload media
Edit, publish, revert, and delete, with a confirm step for the destructiv...
A while back I wrote about building a home server. That post was all Docker containers, DNS, and reverse proxies. The foundation. This post is about what I've started building on that foundation, and it's a little different: the box now does things for me every morning, and I can talk to it from my phone.
The goal I gave myself was loose: an always-on box that smartly automates my life. My laptop isn't always on, so it can't be the thing that runs scheduled jobs. The server is, so that's wher...
