Digital garden
A digital garden is a website, with content on multiple pages which link to each other.
Differentiators from blogs
A digital garden is very similar to a blog.
- Both are available on the public internet for anyone to see
- Both are written by a single person (most of the time)
But digital gardens have a few differences:
- Always growing. All notes are permanently a work in progress. Blogs prefer the philosophy of keeping a post exactly the same after it is published, and if it is changed, a very prominent addendum should be added. Digital gardens don't bother with this limitation, and relish making changes at the whim of the author. A signature of digital gardens of the 90s was Under Construction GIFs.
- Link first organisation. Blogs have a chronological timeline view, with recent posts at the top. A digital garden generally have no such timeline, favouring Links from one post to another as a way to get around. Some even have backlinks.
- No ads or upsells. Blogs frequently have ads, or are written so the author can sell you another product. Digital gardens almost never have ads or sponsorships, and never bother with SEO.
Why the funny name?
Digital gardens were greatly motivated by the observation that simple handwritten notes tend to rot. Some time after they are written, the author may lose them entirely, or forget what the note means.
By contrast, a digital gardener prevents notes from rotting by treating their notes like a living thing.
- Notes tend to begin as rough scrappy notes that need to be delicately tended to, like Seedlings. If you do not quickly refine your note into something more useful, you forget what it means and it dies, just like a seedling π±.
- As you tend to a note by writing in it, you form threads of thought, like branches, forming a tree π³.
- A robust tree, when re-read, can lead to you thinking of new ideas, or fruit π. From these fruit you plant new seedlings, and the cycle continues.
The earliest occurrence of the term "garden" for online notes may be this 1998 essay, Hypertext Gardens.
Maggie Appleton wrote and illustrated a much better analogy of digital gardens here: Growing the Evergreens, and another essay, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.
More reading
My favourite blogs and digital gardens
My digital garden is made using Obsidian and Ole Eskild's Digital Garden plugin. I previously used something called Foam Research, then Jekyll, then Quartz by Jacky.