A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Why I split my site into `/blog` and `/dev/random` and what changed about polish as a signal once AI gets involved.

Writing and learning in public

Static site generator for the digital garden at travisbriggs.com - audiodude/travisbriggs.com

a website about computers, mostly

This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked. Garden History – Maggie Appleton I’m so happy I stumbled upon this article. I am always grateful for new vocabulary that allows me better to express myself, and this is perfect - I want more Digital Gardens in the world. I do see the value in polishing content, but this is where the epistemic status tagging system laid out there really comes to the fore. Do I now want to convert this to a full garden-style site? Or perhaps just introduce different “feeds”, laid out by theme, epistemic status, etc?

My place to put things

Welcome to my new blog. I have been blogging for nearly 20 years, and I decided it’s time for a fresh start. I have been working on replacing the tool, Hexo, that I have been using to manage my blog for several months. After trying several different tools, I finally settled on Emanote as the source for this blog. I have also been involved in a large amount of yak shaving, which has culminated not just replacing the tooling, but replacing my hosting providers too. Maybe I’ll write a post about that whole journey in the future.

Patterns I keep coming back to

Where I blog about my various interests and things that I am working on.

Writing about design, philosophy, and technology.

about this blog Pinewind is a repository for thoughts related to my interests or life in general that, for one reason or another, I felt like putting "out...

/About moin^1], i'm pzumk ([/piː tuː keɪ/) i'm just a random guy ^(he/him)^ in my mid-30s living in hamburg, germany with my wife and our newborn. my d...

Digital Garden content.

Publishing for the internet age.

Pete Millspaugh's digital garden

Pete Millspaugh's digital garden

Welcome to my digital garden. I’ve created it by transferring a public subset of my notes from Obsidian. It’s mostly full of links to other places on the Web at the moment.

What this space means to me

Describing what a 'Digital Garden' is, the tools, process, and purpose.

Online community platforms are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm to...

hello there! i’m olu. this digital garden is for thinking out loud, sketching things out, getting feedback and learning in public/working with the garage door up/showing my work.

Welcome back to my website.

Exploring the many faces of personal websites and what they mean in today's digital landscape

Like the internet, but niko's

searchmysite.net - the open source search engine and search as a service for user-submitted personal and independent websites

How to apply mindfulness to your job as a software engineer.

Ramkarthik is a software engineer and he writes notes, essays, and code.

Digital Garden This here is my digital garden, where content is living and breathing rather than stuck in the time it was written (like blog posts tend to be). I also make use of the approach on my Find the Dash project, but I decided to do a (very) scaled back and simplified version of it here as well. The home page will still contain standard blog posts, but this section will contain content that I tend to, updating over time.

As I write this entry in January 2025, I’m continuing to think about just what I’m trying to do and how best to do it. I’ve contemplated adding a section like this to my blog for some months. I’m not interested in merely listing the books I’m reading – “Hey, world! look at what I’m reading!” My selfish interest in doing this, and in doing it publicly (for the relatively few people who stumble into this small corner of the internet) is to hold myself accountable not only for reading the books I’ve decided to read but also (and more importantly) to push myself to think more carefully about what I’m reading. Doing it publicly is also part of the larger plan to move more of my thinking and writing into a public space — call it a digital garden. Even on a site as rarely visited as this one, there’s something about knowing that it’s available to others that changes my relationship to my thinking.

Iris' home on the web

garden and stream is a metaphor for different kinds & aspects of websites, contrasting growing & linking content slowly & incrementally by topic, versus posting & presenting time-based content chronologically, and the subject of a few IndieWebCamp sessions.

A transparent stream of consciousness accompanying the changes on this website...

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden Maggie Appleton https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc. http://www.e...

Have you heard of digital gardening? Improve your life by learning how to create your own digital garden in Obsidian.

Over the past month, I've looked at quite a lot of blogs. Each one is a bit different. Of course, the design and the contents differ, but what I'm most inter...

Reflections on my ambivalence towards RSS

Today, I wanted to talk about digital gardens, being a whole person on the web, and some changes I think I’m going to be making to my various websites. Let’s dig in! tl;dr: I’m considering merging my ADHD stuff and personal stuff into Go Make Things and my members area. You can read the specifics here, or read the whole way through to understand the what and why. What’s a digital garden?

The technical history, influences, and design of the website.

When an email went round at work asking if anyone was up for giving a lunchtime talk on a hobby, I volunteered to do so. I’ve got to be honest that I did suspect ‘static site personal blogging’ might be considered a bit too esoteric for them to accept, but no, they took me up on it. Whelp! That’s now done, so, to record the details, I’m also writing it up as a few blog posts…

A (long) short note on writing longer short notes

Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs - MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

Borrowing a concept from podcasting, I'm introducing 'seasons' of content on Cybercultural. From season 1 in 2019, when I began this as a newsletter, to the current season 4 focused on dot-com.

Why use tools when you can put everything online?

Digital gardening, an emerging trend?

What is this place? This is a digital garden, specifically Cam’s digital garden.

Everyone Should Blog, And That Includes You

Long time no see! My routine has been shaken over the past couple of months, in the aftermath of the end of term, the holidays, the wrap-up of a work proj…

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

Herein you'll find all the ideas I could find (and think of) for what to do with your site. Features to add, pages to create, posts to write... Hope you find it useful!

Here you'll find all the ideas I could find (and think of) for what to do with your site. Features to add, pages to create, posts to write... Hope you find it useful!

Pete Millspaugh's digital garden

Pete Millspaugh's digital garden

Pete Millspaugh's digital garden

I’ve tried to keep myself thinking about how I want to write and create things on this website and elsewhere in the future, and how it would/should/could affect the way I design the building and reading experience here on the site.

Part of me wants to talk about how fun the internet was when it was just websites. But we barely had tags then, let alone hashtags. Much like the “Y2K Garage...

I have very strong, interconnected synesthesia. This makes categorization of really any kind rather non-linear for me. I’m glad to have avoided developing a ...

Many months ago, I made a goal to write at least one blog post a month on here. I thought it would do me good to practice writing, and to publish things that were useful to other people. I still think that, however I clearly haven’t acheived this goal recently. But where did I write that goal? And where else have I been writing? In lieu of a hard hitting technical blog post, I’ll give an overview of some other places I’ve been putting down my thoughts.

🌿🪴

Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.

Why do we confine ourselves to a handful of apps when the web is so gigantic?

My name is Angela Ambroz, but there are some who call me… briz.

Here are a few people whose work inspires me to be more open and creative.

I redid my site again; this post goes over why, and what's changed this time around.

when visiting my parents a few weeks ago, i picked up one of the books on my mom’s bookshelf, the first of barack obama’s presidential memoirs. i started reading it, but it was kind of hefty and i was only going to be there for a week and didn’t want to start a book i couldn’t finish, so i put it down and picked up another one instead (which, turns out i couldn’t finish that one, either, so maybe i didn’t have to abandon the obama book). anyway, i made it through the intro before deciding to put it down, and one point he shared really stuck with me which i have been reflecting on since: president obama says he prefers to draft his writing by hand, on paper, not by typing on a computer or word processor, because it gives a false sense of completeness or polish. (i’m paraphrasing.)

Hi All! 🤗 There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about”...

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.) The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna. In this novel, Kavenna weaves together four tales on motherhood. The weaving of the four is both explicit and implicit. The first tale is a semi-fictional account of the last days of Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th century Viennese doctor who theorized that the deaths of many women just after giving birth was caused by an infection introduced by doctors who moved directly from performing autopsies on women who had died to assisting other women in the birth of their children. The women were dying of postpartum infection introduced by the doctors’ unwashed hands. Semmelweis conducted his own experiment, washing his hands in a chlorinated lime solution before assisting in a birth, and lowered the mortality rate of his patients dramatically. However, he had no explanation for why hand washing was effective — germ theory came later — and his medical colleagues refused to follow his advice. They ridiculed him and said he had no business instructing them about personal hygiene. Semmelweis didn’t deal with this rejection very well — he suffered a nervous breakdown, and died in an asylum after his colleagues had him committed.

Some patterns for modern content websites

Expanding my digital garden with Typography notes and Library reflections.

Personal digital garden

"the aloe dot gay project" on aloe dot gay

WELCOME TO THE DOMAIN OF THE PORTFIEND

Hello, I’m Akash 👋🏽 Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m a London based coffee fueled Software Engineer. My interests include, but are not limited to: writing, travelling, coding, cycling, video games, and a recent favourite of mine, archery! This website is a home for everything I’ve learnt, enjoyed and things I've worked on. Basically it’s my digital garden - An ever growing collection of my notes, ideas, thoughts and more.

Reflections on my ambivalence towards RSS

A brief introduction to digital gardens

Cultivating seeds, sprouts, and evergreen notes

A metaphor to help you understand this blog

Swapping from Vue to Eleventy | by Bryn Newell

Hi All! 🤗 There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about”...

Long time no see! My routine has been shaken over the past couple of months, in the aftermath of the end of term, the holidays, the wrap-up of a work proj…

The other day I stumbled upon Naty’s beautiful blog and found lots of suggestions about implementing indieweb features on websites generated by Hugo — such as this very blog. Among the articles, a guide attracted my attention in particular: inserting a like button on the blog like Bearblog’s one? Is this sci-fi?! I immediately went to iine’s GitHub repository and loved the idea, but quickly found that the “quick and dirty” self-hosted option is based on Supabase or needs a PostgreSQL database installed.

A digital garden is a personal online space where ideas, notes, and knowledge are shared in an evolving, non-linear way.

I love my website!

Why I abandoned my WordPress site & am starting over

Time and time again, we are shown that we cannot rely on third-party platforms to host our content. It's time to start owning our digital content.

Toddlin' on

While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

Random thoughts & ideas.

Designer (Interaction/UX/UI) based in Manchester, England

Arcane curation from the IndieWeb, Fediverse and Cybersecurity realms

Old articles and blog posts too often get removed from the web or neglected, left to rot on broken pages. Replanting lets you migrate legacy content to your current site so it can thrive again.

📜 An aggregator of independently-owned blogs. Contribute to blogscroll/blogscroll development by creating an account on GitHub.

While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together.

Welcome to Sam’s garden § Along with my blog, Five Eights, this is a part of my little corner of the internet. It’s an experiment in “remembering in public”, and a home for unfinished thoughts, side projects, and random facts I found interesting.

Meta thoughts on the halfway point of my self-imposed month of daily writing.

Over the holidays I rebuilt this blog from scratch. This isn’t the first time it’s needed major maintenance. For such a simple piece of software, it’s been surprisingly hard to keep operational for - at time of writing - 13 years. I thought a recap of its history would be interesting, if only as a cautionary tale for my future self. Since I started this blog I moved country, got married, became a US citizen, adopted two cats, bought a home, sold a startup, worked at several companies and did three stints as an independent contractor… and somehow didn’t yet manage to write about any of those things on this blog!

I’m publishing a subset of my private notes as a digital garden, as a home for unfinished thoughts, experiments, and random facts I find interesting. Easy to update and without the pressure to craft a polished essay, I hope it will complement this blog. I don’t necessarily expect anyone to read any of it, but it’d be lovely if somebody found something interesting there and started a conversation with me about it! Right now it’s mostly a bunch of original1 cocktail recipes, but I’m looking forward to growing this garden over time and seeing what it becomes. Cocktails have been around for a couple of hundred years (estimates vary) and most cocktail recipes are simple variations of other recipes, with an ingredient substituted or proportions tweaked. This means parallel evolution is extremely likely, and any recipe will have been “invented” multiple times by different people. (In fact, many classic cocktails like the Manhattan and Martini have many competing and equally apocryphal origin stories!) So my cocktails are “original” in the sense that I didn’t follow a recipe when first making them, but I don’t claim that they are novel. ↩