The garden

A digital garden is, a collection of thoughts, articles, links, and content, built and arranged in a non-linear manner.

Maggie Appleton defines the following "patterns" of gardening:

• Topography over Timelines: it's about links and topics, not about what was published when.
• Continuous Growth: things don't tend to end up completely finished - they go through drafts.
• Imperfection & Learning in Public: this isn't just a place for finished work - it's also a place to think out loud, to work in public, to show off things before they're complete.
• Playful, Personal, and Experimental: gardens should be non-homogeneous, experimenting with technologies and subverting norms.
• Intercropping & Content Diversity: not just a bunch of linear text! Gardens can include code snippets, videos, audio, social media snippets, etc...
• Independent Ownership: this is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself and building from there. Not about renting!

This garden is a non-linear place for me to start building out what will hopefully be a "web" of interconnected nodes which mesh together and provide an explorable database of stuff. At this stage it's still formative, so you can expect rough edges, stubs of nodes, a lack of interconnectedness, and so forth.

Even before it's reached maturity, I've gone through many different phases of thinking how this should work.

Garden design principles

Just the right amount of structure

Garden nodes (that is, individual pages) should function kind of like articles in Wikipedia. Articles could have grouping structures like categories, metadata like lifecycle status, anything like that - but they don't need it.

At the end of the day, the key thing is that a node can be located at a URL (hopefully pretty constant), and they can be linked. Additional structure - like a collection structure, or relying on categories - is nice to have but not essential, and can always be added after the fact.

Each node is a topic, not just one idea

Unlike Zettelkasten, a node in my garden may have multiple ideas about one topic, in the same way that a Wikipedia page will have multiple ideas about a topic. That's fine. Nodes can grow until they feel too unwieldy, and then they can split.

Everything in one namespace

Unless I come across something I need later, everything sits in the one namespace. No nested namespaces, nothing like that. Potentially I could do special pages for links and the like, but I doubt it. Simple first.