While building this site (not the design side – that was someone else, see the “History” story for details on that!), I have been doing a lot of programming. And a lot of fiddling with code comes with lots of interaction with online forums like Stack Overflow and GitHub and all that fun stuff. I kind of enjoy it. Not as much as climbing, but enough that I get really stuck in and “perfectionise” everything.

While browsing around, I found this website “For The Badge” that generates programming-like badges. Why do they exist? I think it’s a relic from early days of programming, where people tracked in a somewhat visual way what software was made from, how far along the development cycle it was etc.

Read more about the history of programming badges here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35563012/what-are-the-status-tags-like-build-passing

As I read them, I realised that they don’t HAVE to be all about programming. I thought climbing ones sounded fun, so I made some:

They even come in 3-panel designs, which is not normally done with badges, as far as I can see. Still, it allows for stuff like this:

And for a long time now I’ve been looking for a place to put them. Lo and behold, when I set up the “Course Notifier” email system recently, you’ll see a random one of these badges at the bottom, hanging out like they are supposed to be there. A sort of easter-egg in the email building software, a bit of fun with no real purpose other than to entertain.

Do you want to receive these Course Notification emails? Use the form below to be notified about new courses you are interested in!

Do you have any more ideas on what these badges should say? Generate your own at https://forthebadge.com/#/generator, send them to me and I’ll add them to be randomly added to the footer of the Course Notifier emails!