The garden: open for business

Digital gardens have been on my mind for some time, but it's only recently that my own has really started to coalesce. So I thought I'd write about it a little.

A digital garden, in essence, is a collection of linked pieces of writing. Maggie Appleton's useful summary of the term elaborates:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites “should be.” It’s an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.

There's lots of different types of digital garden: one of the things I quite like about the form is that you can impose as much (or as little) structure as you like. Each item in your garden can be carefully categorised by topic, situated amongst others, linked to within an inch of its life to provide a tight webbing of ideas and correlations - or your notes can exist free-form, with nothing but a title and some text to their name, occasionally linked to others in a sparse net.

In fact, this is one of the things that delayed my really putting the garden front-and-centre on here. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted my garden organised, and whenever I did get ideas about organisation, I found that organising the stuff I did have was more effort than it felt it merited.

So now I have what I have: a series of nodes, loosely interlinked, with little metadata or additional structure. It's small now, hopefully growing over time, slowly, but gradually.

It's over here.