My website is a digital garden.
I let term digital garden mean what I need it to mean for me and I am still exploring and learning about this space. As my take on it evolves, so will this site.
There are some really smart people out there talking about this concept and I have been soaking up as much information that I can find as I work on new ways to manage my knowledge and distribute it in useful ways.
Maggie Appleton has lots of great resources on digital gadening. Her own digital garden is quite impressive and I have taken lots of inspiration from how she thinks about gardening and creating content.
An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I’m currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
Maggie also created an “awesome list” type repo on GitHub that includes resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs.
@swyx also had a great livestream with Maggie talking through the concept of digital gardening that I really enjoyed.
[livestream] Growing Digital Gardens w/ Maggie Appleton - YouTube
I came across a good article from MIT Technology Review that interviewed Maggie Appleton as well as a few others: Digital Gardens Let You Cultivate Your Own Little Bit of the Internet
Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.
The movement might be gaining steam now, but its roots date back to 1998, when Mark Bernstein introduced the idea of the “hypertext garden,” arguing for spaces on the internet that let a person wade into the unknown.
Beneath the umbrella term, however, digital gardens don’t follow rules. They’re not blogs, short for “weblogs,” a term that suggests a time-stamped record of thought. They’re not a social-media platform—connections are made, but often it’s through linking to other digital gardens, or gathering in forums like Reddit and Telegram to nerd out over code.
In fact, the whole point of digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist.
Another well known digital garden belongs to Joel Hooks.
The phrase “digital garden” is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.
Just like plants in the garden I’ve got posts that are in various stages of growth and nurturing. Some might wither and die, and others (like this one you are reading) will flourish and provide a source of continued for the gardener and folks in community that visit
What makes a garden is interesting. It’s personal. Things are organized and orderly, but with a touch of chaos around the edges.
Curation comes before a chronological list. The chronological list is still there, but when you click “all articles” instead of numbered pages, all of the articles on that page are visible. If I had thousands of posts that might be a problem, but with my fairly small catalog the pages loads fast and you can scroll through it easily.