Digital garden

#productivity #learning #technology #personal-knowledge-management #needs-update
May 23, 2022
Apr 26, 2024

A digital garden is a place for thoughts, knowledge and ideas to grow.

Philosophy

Digital gardens are not really meant to be chronological or easily navigable. They should be densely linked to each other so that one can trawl through them similarly to how you would in a forest.

Reminds me of a second brain, PKM (personal knowledge management system), life wiki, Zettelkasten, Evergreen notes, all those bigs words. But there is something distinctly cute uwu about the notion of a digital garden.

The main reference for what a digital garden is comes from Maggie Appleton. I will not follow the original ethos to the T, but it's a very nice read nonetheless.

For me, the main pull towards maintaining a digital garden is that it's not as intensive as a blog. As outlined in Maggie's writing, a blog requires you to do all of this background research before eventually deciding to release a perfectly manicured opinion to the internet, exerting your intellectual authority onto all who pass through your site. A digital garden acknowledges that learning is ongoing, and that we will never know everything, or anything, in its entirety.

I recently overhauled this website, and more can be read about this at Digital Garden overhaul with Obsidian Plugin.

Some inspiration

Zettels theme

A website with a nice "all articles" page (the ability to multi-select tags at the top, like Maggie Appleton's website)

Useful articles to look at later

Nice examples:

Examples using the Digital Garden Plugin