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

  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

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

If you’re using something I built and its not working PLEASE tell me. I love making tools people find useful. And I'm always open to polite suggestions on how it might be better.

Aaron Crowder

Gardn'ing on the IndieWeb
Aaron Crowder

Check out my Gardn page! It's a fun new website that let's you log in with your website! Very IndieWeb, lol. Each plant is unique based on your domain. I'm hoping to figure out how to give the plants more variety (and let users re-generate if they already signed up!), but who knows when lol. If you sign up (I can see a couple of you already!) please send me links to your Gardn page on your own websites!

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