Aaron Crowder

I’m sitting here writing this on the couch of the in-law suite at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in St. George, Utah. Now that is a sentence I never would have guessed I’d be writing last year. Honestly, it’s not even a sentence I think I could have guessed I’d be writing back in April. But here I am. That feels like as good a place as any to pause, look forward, and write down a few goals for 2026. I’m a firm believer that growth without goals is mostly accidental, and I’d like to be a litt...

I just merged PR #21 into django-blog, adding first-class h-card support across the app. This is part of my slow march toward more semantic, IndieWeb-friendly markup without bolting on heavy third-party tooling. This change is mostly invisible from a UI perspective, but it adds a lot of structure under the hood. What’s an H-Card? An h-card is a microformat for representing a person or organization in HTML. Think of it as a lightweight, standards-based alternative to things like JSON-LD for b...

I recently started my journey of rebuilding this blog using Django. It's a learning experience for me, with the side benefit of nudging me to write more. Something I wanted to add was some super basic analytics to help make sure this site is actually being used by someone other than me. I wanted to see things like a (somewhat naive) count of unique visitors, total page views, where requests were coming from (both referrer and geographically), and response codes (mostly so I can find 404s). Th...

I have been fascinated by the IndieWeb community for years. I have participated on and off as well, using this URL even. But my website has gone through so many iterations over the years that I've long since lost all that content. This iteration of my blog is designed to be the start of my IndieWeb comeback story. It's a project, which always seems to help keep me engaged. Like all software, it will never be "done", and thus will always give me something to work on when I have time to work on...