What is a digital garden? And what is it to me?

I will be trying to figure this out.

Currently, it’s a way to:

  • lower the bar to writing
  • debugging my thinking
  • an emerging semi-structured way of archiving my knowledge.
    • Here’s to hoping retrieval will also be figured out along the way.

Since the idea of a digital garden is that things are allowed to grow and start small the pressure of publishing something ‘finished’ like a blog post is not there. At least to me.

Things written here will grow, or not, like in a garden.

Guiding principles

  • The goal is to learn.
  • I write for myself.
    • Publishing the garden gives me a little push to write not just gibberish.
  • Notes with the seed tag are for notes that have only just sprouted and are very drafty, and might just even be a bookmark.
    • I’m making a deliberate choice to not including a middle tier.
  • Notes with the fruit tag are for notes that have already received a lot more love and could potentially be coherent ;).
  • To give some entry points to the garden and manage the Explorer component I’m adding the waypoint -tag

I am taking a lot of inspiration from https://jzhao.xyz/posts/networked-thought

This reminds me, I want to be able to neatly attribute to sources where a thought might be derived from. How do I do that with the current Obsidian and Quartz setup?

Technical details

  • Obsidian for notes.
  • Notes version controlled via Git on self-hosted Forgejo.
  • Static content build thanks to Quartz.
  • Content served through a self-hosted Kubernetes.