digital gardens

Definition by example: penny tours of pretty gardens

Lot of IndieWebClub repeat offenders are pretty gardens.

Some history

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

What's a digital garden for?

Challenges and limitations

It's hard to write stories.
The interface between gardens and "finished" work is hard to build.
It's hard to tell what's noteworthy in a garden.

Gardens vs blogs

Gardening tools you may have come across

As you might imagine, there's been a lot of convergent evolution in this space. Phyiscal, digital, web, web-only; private, public, restricted to a company or a private community.

Evernote
Notion
Obsidian
Roam Research
org-mode and org-roam
vimwiki
Tiddlywiki
Logseq
Forester

One must note that any blogging system can be used as a garden. Digital gardening is a conceptual technology.

What's more, most of the technology you can use has further opinions on how things should be done with it. They can be helpful guardrails for when you want to dive in headfirst, but aren't very good for starting small – or staying small. (See Maggie Appleton again on home-cooked software.)

Minimal starter kit

Seed process

You need to answer 4 questions:

where do the notes live?
when do you create a note?
when do you visit a note (and what for)?
when do you update a note?

Workflow for process changes

As time goes on, you'll want to augment the process. This process ends up being much more bespoke, with few possibilities of truly general claims.

Nonetheless some reflection questions are useful:

What's causing you friction with any of your current gardening processes?
What sounds fun to implement? What seems beautiful? Meditative?
What in your life is shaped like a garden, or like gardening?