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Adding H-Card Support to django-blog

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Testing Shopify Webhooks Locally With shopify-webhook-faker

by Aaron Crowder on

If you’ve ever built a Shopify app, you already know that webhooks are at the heart of the platform. Everything from orders and fulfillments to customers and subscriptions fires through them. But actually testing Shopify webhooks during development can be exhausting. You either need a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint, a tunnel that loves to break at the worst possible moment, or a staging environment just to debug one handler. Triggering real events from the Shopify admin is slow, unreliab...

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Basic Analytics in a Django App

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Body Doubling Night

by Aaron Crowder on

My girlfriend Azure and I sometimes do body doubling night where we each take part in our own hobbies in the same room as each other. It's a great way to spend time together and still have our own interests. Azure Azure's been working on her alcohol ink art. She's getting really good! I love watching her create art. Aaron I've been working on my blog (of course lol). I created a workable posting interface from the front-end of this blog. It's what I'm using to write this post (mostly as a t...

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IndieWeb Foundations

by Aaron Crowder on

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...

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Resume Website

by Aaron Crowder on

This month marks 4 years at Govalo. I started as a staff engineer and have since been promoted twice (lead engineer, then chief engineer). It's been a wild, exciting, difficult, and fulfilling ride. I've grown more the past 4 years than I think I have at any other job. Sadly all good things, however good they are, must surely come to an end. We're approaching the end of my tenure at Govalo. At the end of this month I will be officially without full-time employment. Thankfully I've got some co...

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Blog Refresh: Django

by Aaron Crowder on

I have tinkered with this blog on and off for years. In fact, I've had a blog at some URL in some form going back over two decades. My inability to stick with a single URL or publishing platform should be documented and studied. Nevertheless here I am writing about yet another blog refresh. I won't say this will be the last, nor will I pontificate about how this platform was custom built for me by me to grow with me. I will simply continue to write here or I won't. Only time will tell. If you...

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Signing Git Commits

by Aaron Crowder on

Have you ever noticed the "verified" badge next to a commit on GitHub? A few years ago I did an wondered how I could get that on my own commits. After a little googling I realized it was because those commits were signed. Signing a commit with a GPG key is something natively supported by Git as it turns out. Now this is one of the first things I set up on a new dev machine. Setting it up is fairly straight forward. Prerequisites You will need to have gpg and git installed. Additionally you w...

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Apologize Like You Mean It

by Aaron Crowder on

Today is Father's day, a day where we celebrate the dad's in our lives. Rather than write an appreciation post though, I wanted to write about something that men everywhere can do better. That's why I decided to write about apologizing. It's something that few men do, and even fewer do well. Even worse I've seen so many instances lately where men are directly asked to apologize and refuse to. But the point of this post isn't to call anyone out. It's meant to educate everyone on what a good a...

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Hour of Code

by Aaron Crowder on

Yesterday I took part in the Hour of Code at my local high school as a volunteer. In fact, it was at the high school that I attended. I had a lot of fun and I was excited to see the stundents gain a deeper understanding of code. I was especially impressed with the number of young women in the class that seemed to really enjoy it. It's a really common misunderstanding that people hold that girls aren't interested in tech. I think in too many cases they are steered in other directions, towards...

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