From Digital Gardening Tools and Resources, what is “digital gardening”?
A garden is something inbetween [sic] a personal blog and a wiki. It’s a collection of evolving notes, essays, and ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – posts are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - posts can be published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal “blogs” we’re used to encountering on the web.
I have read about this a few times already, and every single time I find it interesting and makes a lot of sense.
I have always had a personal website. I started around 1998, so for me is pretty much always. Recently I celebrated 20 years of usebox.net, in a way my last personal website. And it kind of felt like that already.
If a wiki is a self-editable website where anybody can contribute, a digital garden could be just a wiki where the owner is the only one editing it, perhaps? I don’t feel like the focus should be in the lack of publication date but in the fact that the content is a work in progress that may be finished at some point, or abandoned in current state.
I like the blog to dump ideas or comment on things that I find interesting, because that helps me to solidify my thoughts –like I’m doing right now–, but it is true that the blog posts eventually disappear to never be seen again –down deep the archive–. There are tags that can help to find content that is related, but there is no further refinement: things get published and are final.
Let’s look for example to my post on bank switching. I think it is a blog post in which the date when it was published is not important and instead refinement of the content would be better –that’s why I transcribed the content to CPC Wiki, so it doesn’t get lost–.
I was looking at mkdocs last night, because I like it and this was the perfect excuse to put something together, but I woke up today undecided. I already have this website, and it could work as well to keep my notes –call it work in progress or digital garden–, I just need to find a way to make that information accessible.
Further info:
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
- A very interesting How the Blog Broke the Web
- A prime example of a digital garden is The Website of Gwern Branwen