I am creating a Digital Garden

Nov 27, 2022

Some weeks ago I came across an interesting concept called a “Digital Garden”. As someone who likes nature, animals and plants I was really excited about a thing called a Digital Garden, so in this post I want to give a short introduction into what a Digital Garden is, and what my plan is for my homepage to slowly evolve into my very own Digital Garden.

What is a Digital Garden?

There really doesn’t seem to be a “scientific” concept behind the idea of a Digital Garden. From what I have seen on the different websites that provide technologies to create a Digital Gardens (e.g. the website of the note-taking tool I use) or people and companies who actually work with the concept, this is the basic idea:

Let`s collect all ideas, notes and thoughts you might have (like a big, permanently ongoing “Brain-Storming”) and put them into a single digital space.

Typically this starts with some kind of note-taking application, where one is able to quickly write down thoughts as they come along and can put those into relation with each other (something like a knowledge-network). What one would do is basically building some kind of digital collection of all kinds of things: I saw Digital Gardens which include the authors favorite books and movies, thoughts about philosophy or even notes for their next scientific paper - all in a state that is not defined and does not have to be as refined as it might should be for a blog post or similar. Some pages can even contain only a few words or links to things the author wanted to remember or add to the Garden.

One really great Digital Garden, that inspires me, is the one created by Alexis Rondeau.

What I want my Digital Garden to look like (for now)

Because everybody thinks differently and collects data, ideas and thoughts in different ways, the way my garden will hopefully one day look like might be very different from what you might imagine. But this is one of the things I really like about the concept: The idea, that information I would like to share, like in this blog post, can simply evolve and live, just like plants in a garden, and might at the same time be a helpful tool for me and maybe others - without having to conform to some external expectations.

In the future I might collect some of my ideas and thoughts here in this blog and will not limit it to a specific category, like technology, as I did in the past, but just let it live freely. In my garden, I will however, not “plant” every thought and idea. I still believe that my garden, especially as my public one, has to be kept clean and tidy: a little bit wild here and there, but overall in a controlled manner - at least for now. So the texts, I hope, shall still have a bit of quality so that they are of use to other visitors to the garden.

How I will do it

So how will I go about it? For a start I will simply create blog posts here - and I hope that this time I can get into some kind of persistency doing that :D - and put them into categories that are searchable. From time to time, and if a little bit of information has collected, I shall make an “overview” post reviewing the grown garden and what happened in it. I think some of the topics I actually have some things on are these: Aquariums and keeping fish, photography (maybe some pictures per week or month) and arts. Let’s see what happens. I did anyway the most important step already, re-adding a CMS that works fine for writing :D What it is currently missing is the “Knowledge Network” aspect, that for I have an easy overview and can relate posts to each other. I am not yet sure how I am going to do this using Ghost, but for writing Ghost somehow works best for my creative flow. Anyways - let`s see how this goes and see you in the garden!

Update June 2023: I switched to a pure text based layout once more. For the reasons why, see this blog post.