What is a digital garden?
A regular blog usually consists of long-form posts that are rarely updated after their initial publication, while a digital garden treats its content like a plant in a real life garden.
In a digital garden, a concept or idea is “planted” and tended to, pruned and fertilized, with the hopes of eventually growing big and strong. It is a living thing that you take care of by coming back to and updating with new information or corrections.
Key concepts
Organic organization
The structure of a digital garden is realized over time. Unlike a normal blog, the publication date of posts are not the primary method of navigation. Posts are grouped together by theme, hierarchy, or by referencing each other, eventually allowing a reader to naturally traverse between posts as they desire.
A great way of traversing through digital gardens are bi-directional links (AKA wikilinks), very common in wikipedia style sites. Normal mono-directional links are 1-way connections to another page. The page being linked to is unaware of what other pages are pointing to it. A bi-directional link completes the cycle by making a page aware of what other pages are linking to it, so it can generate a list of “references” and allow the reader to easily return where they came from, or find other related pages referencing the same thing.
Other common exploration/discovery methods: thematic grouping, advanced search & filtering, and visual relation graphs.
Continuous improvement
The content in a digital garden is always being updated and evolves over time. There is no “final version”, there is always a possibility of new additions or refinement. When there is something you want to write about, you do not have to wait until it is fully fleshed out and “complete”. It can start as a rough collection of related links, and random bits of information. Overtime you expand up it, and refine it to something more.
Imperfection
Writing out perfect articles for self-promotion or some kind of professional advertisement of your knowledge is not the goal. Digital gardens should be more personal and intimate. You are sharing and exposing your learning process and growth publicly.
Make it clear to readers how “done” or how much time has been invested into each note. A basic categorization system:
- 🌱 seedling - for rough, early ideas
- 🌿 budding - for notes with moderate effort invested or improvement
- 🌲 evergreen - for notes that are nearly complete
Personal and unique
Create the content you are interested in, in whatever way makes sense to you. There is no standard template or layout, so experiment with different ways of connecting and grouping posts. Your digital garden should be a representation of you, and your way of thinking.
Do not limit yourself to any particular medium. Text, video, images, drawings, code, etc., should all be freely used.
Own your content
Your digital garden is yours and should be in your control. Using 3rd party, or corporate platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, etc., removes your ability to build your garden how you want. They also have potential to shutdown, taking your content with them.
Use technologies or services that give you ownership and control over your data. Traditional tools like raw HTML/CSS and plaintext formats like markdown are safest as they allow you to easily backup and transfer your garden as necessary.
Links
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, Maggie Appleton
- My blog is a digital garden, not a blog, Joel Hooks