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

PADD Gets a Big Upgrade
Aaron Crowder

I've been busy! There's a big batch of improvements landing in PADD today. It touches pretty much every part of the app so I'm writing this post to walk y'all through it. First though, I want to give a disclaimer: I'm building this stuff primarily for myself (not you, sorry). I want a good way to quickly post to my own site and read the blogs I care about. PADD is my attempt at that. If it turns out to be useful to other people, that's great. If not? Well, then at least I have a reader I like...

Read more

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

Introducing PADD
Aaron Crowder

Today I had a few hours to kill with my partner in the ER. She's okay, I promise! It wasn't the way we wanted to spend our Friday, but it gave me time to hack on something I've been toying with for a while. I give you: PADD. Yesterday I shared a screenshot of something else I'm making but the test UI was Star Trek themed. That was kinda based on this lol. Kinda. Padd is a Microsub Reader. The biggest thing this one does over others I've used is save my replies in-line. So I don't forget if I...

Read more
  1. lcars html rendering tool
    A 'lil LCARs HTML rendering utility I made to test the iFraming.

Earlier today I made a caw page that was a coloring page of a raven that you could download to share on your own website.

Building that inspired me to build something...

IndieWeb.ink

This is a screenshoot of a test I did of indieweb.ink. It's a new #IndieWeb tool for creating and remixing photos. You login with your domain, upload a picture you want to share on your site for your visitors to remix (think coloring pages, but really... anything should work!), and then embed the iFrame on your website!

Then your visitors can color on the page, download it, or even click "Publish" to login with their own website and publish it (using micropub) to their site!

I'm not quite ready to launch it (thinking maybe next weekend!), but I'll be sure to share regular updates this week.

Aaron Crowder

I made a no‑build CMS for Neocities
Aaron Crowder

I’ve been wanting a dead‑simple way to publish small personal sites on Neocities without build tools, databases, or plugins. Today I’m sharing Neo‑CMS — a tiny flat‑file CMS that renders Markdown right in the browser. The whole idea is: just files. Drop Markdown into /content, list those files in content/index.json, and add a little YAML front matter for titles, menus, and slugs. That’s it. No build step. No dependencies. No CLI. If you can edit a text file and upload it to Neocities, you ca...

Read more