Digital gardening

Just somewhere on the internet to put notes and things you find interesting.

My garden

is a handful of Markdown files assembled with pandoc and a shitty Makefile. I edit it with vscode. It’s hosted via github pages; CI runs make and serves the contents of the out directory. This is fairly spartan; that is intentional.

Using a pandoc “lua filter” I’m able to guess the <title> of the page from the first heading on the page (so I don’t need to manually set a title), and rewrite intra-doc links (so I can just write [text](page) to create a link to /page.html). Pandoc lua filters are pretty interesting! And vscode understands that link syntax so I can ctrl-click to navigate between markdown files.

I don’t use it yet but I’ve been thinking about the djot format designed by the pandoc guy. It’s a little bit better than markdown. Although the format supporting enough “tools for thought” to write useful notes is more important than the format being ideologically elegant or whatever.

Why garden

• Learning in public: Asking questions, recording the beginner’s process. Making mistakes. Looking stupid!
• Permanence: Thoughts get lost on microblogging services.
• Impermanence: Noone expects a garden to stay static. I can edit and delete pages without bothering people.
• Selfishness: It’s easier to access my notes if they’re on the web.
• Web 1.0: It’s my website and I can put whatever I damn well want on it, on my own terms. Hows that.

Why not garden

There’s plenty of reasons not to garden. I wrote about some on my blog.

• Too public: You can’t write private things in your notes.
• Complexity: Hosting notes is tricky and clutters up the repo containing the notes.
• Headstrong: You really think people want to read your notes?

I also think it’s possible to work yourself into a corner trying to make your thoughts too “presentable”. Honest thinking is true and messy and disorganized especially when you are learning something for the first time.

Their gardens

I like the famous wikiblogarden by todepond.

There’s a subreddit. People seem to like Obsidian? I don’t use Obsidian but that’s cool. There’s also a lot of commercial offerings. Somehow I feel like that goes against the spirit of the thing.

Against RSS

This section of my site doesn’t have an RSS feed on purpose. When I write here, I don’t put on a Web Publisher hat. I’m writing primarily for myself; if web passerbys like riffling through my pages, that’s only a bonus. The lack of a feed means I don’t feel pressured to write only about things that are “valuable” to my “audience”, and I don’t feel pressured to avoid writing for the sake of not “spamming people’s feeds”.

When Cohost closed, a lot of people were bringing up RSS as an alternative to keeping up with their friends online. I was never too fond of that idea because blogging and RSS does feel too “formal”. A blog post feels like it needs to be an event with an introduction, exploration, and tidy conclusion. Not every thought is like that.