Digital gardens are note systems (usually published ones although some people talk about private digital gardens but to me that’s just notes) where instead of sequential publishing, authors publish their ever-evolving notes on topics they are interested in.
Obsidian Rocks condenses the idea to “a casual and effortless note-taking philosophy” and some people have been talking about moving towards them from blogging. Rach Smith in My blog is dead. Long live my digital garden says: “the main thing holding me back from publishing more frequently is perfectionism, overthinking, and fear of being judged harshly.”
These gardens take many shapes and forms. Some are more blog-like with individual posts and others are more Zettelkasten-style, a network of interlinked small, atomic notes. Mine is a public subset of my personal, private notes.
Jacky Zhao explains the concept in his digital garden as:
A digital garden is not a file cabinet, nor is it fully an index. A digital garden is less so a well-kempt plot for farming and more a mess of entangled growth. It is a network of interconnected ideas and thoughts, clustered by how they are associated with each other.
This is not because I don’t like order, but because I think a dash of chaos and entropy is good for new ideas. They help connect two separate ideas that you normally would not have associated with each other, and to imagine the ‘what if’ more frequently.
This resonates well with Mark Twain’s thoughts on ideas, from his autobiography:
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.
Maggie Appleton has gathered together history of digital gardens and how the term and what it means has evolved. In it, she references Mike Caufield:
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it’s not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It’s a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
Accumulating the knowledge and using it to better understand the world is at the core of my personal notes – and by extension this digital garden.
Caufield himself has a great example of how to write and expand a note and how to connect it with other notes in the system. If the text fragment link doesn’t work, search for “So when I see an article” and that’s where the example starts.
See also: Thinking through notes.
Chris Armstrong compares blogging and digital gardens by arguing that blogs put emphasis on what’s new while gardens accumulate knowledge and understanding, making the older content better:
By placing emphasis on ‘what’s updated’, digital gardens value more battle-hardened content that’s earned it’s authority through innumerable updates and iterations.
Few considerations I have
There are a few things I’ve been thinking about (and haven’t quite solved yet) when it comes to publishing a digital garden.
Link rot from outside in
A website changes way less often than always evolving notes system. Notes are being created, split, moved, merged and reorganised very often which makes digital garden like this very vulnerable for link rot.
Link rot means the process of links leading to this garden leading to more and more 404s as the original note was changed, renamed or moved to a different place. A website is more of a publication in a sense that you make updates more intentionally and publish them and then don’t make major changes. A digital garden, especially one built on top of ever-living active note system has three possible routes:
- Focus on keeping URLs stable by not changing notes → leads to less flexible note system and adds layers of unwelcome complexity and clunkiness to actually writing and working on notes.
- Build a redirect system that keeps track of every published URL and then keeps track of where they have moved. This can be automised to some extend but also requires manual labour to keep up to date. Over time the redirect rules can grow massive.
- Let it rot. Focus on serving as an effective note system rather than a sustainable web project.
All of them have trade-offs and I don’t yet know which one this digital garden will lead to.
Copyright of content
When I was planning to start this digital garden, I came across an interesting dilemma. When I keep notes for private use, I can copy direct quotes, code snippets, examples and pictures from sources to my notes. I often copy even significant chunks to have access to them locally when I’m offline.
Once I start publishing notes to the public, there are legal and ethical considerations that come into the picture. I can always link to the original and that’s probably the only proper way to go but I do feel like the effectiveness of notes themselves for private use suffers quite a bit.
The barrier between private and public
For a digital garden to be effectively built, it should be as closely tied to the actual notes system I use daily. The wider the gap between working with my notes and publishing a digital garden grows, more likely I am to not publish those notes and eventually abandon the public garden.
So my idea is to publish a subset of my actual notes as-is. However, this creates a barrier between private and public notes and creates restrictions on working with notes. Most important one being that I cannot cross from public to private. I cannot reference any private note from any public note. That means some of my notes will lose some of their potential value in the notes system because they can only refer to a subset of notes.