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). My makefile has a make push phony target that commits and pushes for me. This is all in service of making it easier to just write without worrying too much about the writing environment.

There are better formats than Markdown, but the most important things are: I don’t have to think about it when I type it, and it has easily accessible “tools for thought” (lists, tables, sections) that align with the way I think.

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.
• Una’s garden.
• Arty’s garden.

There’s a subreddit. People seem to like Obsidian? There’s 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.

blogging is for finished longform work or whatever. microblogging is for posting your lunch

this is a secret third thing

centiblogging

“Gardening” is kind of silly isn’t it

Sometimes I look back at this website and think “oh, ‘digital gardening’, also known as ‘putting stuff on your website’”. It has a web 1.0 feel to it somehow. The idea of a personal website created by “dumping whatever you want onto it” feels outdated? lately it’s like every website needs to be chronological or have a clearly-defined topic or some central gimmick. Is that good or is that growthhacking nonsense