Tending a garden

It was, I think, about two years ago, that someone pointed me to the idea of a digital garden. It's a concept somewhat esoteric to anyone who's not knee deep in online culture (I'm not talking about terminally online online culture, but rather the web of the early 2000s online culture).

There's a number of explanations out there, in this article it goes like this:

A digital garden is basically a combination of an online notebook and a personal wikipedia. It’s your personal collection of ideas.

While I like the simplicity here, it can be a lot more than that. Here's another one by Maggie Appleton, who's probably the OGs of digital gardens. In her essay "A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden", she writes this:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

In my mind, that's the kind of definition that got me interested in the concept. Not least, because of this existence of this very blog right there.

It has been around since the early 2000s, it's filled with a lot of ephemera, and these past few years, I've made (a bit of) an effort, to revive it. I wrote more and I started using it as my hub for a lot of other things I do online – it now houses my filmlog (via my reviews on Letterboxd), my linklog (via links curated in Raindrop) and my photolog (at the moment by pulling in photos from my pixelfed instance, a federated instagram-alternative).

But, I've alwys liked the idea of a digital garden. Not just putting things out there in chronological way, but also around topics, ideas and by not being shy about editing what you've already put out there (or, to turn that around, to put imperfect things out there, and changing them up later).

So, I decided to change things here a bit. I adapted a Ghost theme that creates less of a chronological feel, gave the logs their own looks, created the "note" category, which is basically tweets (or seedlings), and created a new look and feel for longer texts, like this one, and how they appear on the frontpage.

Long story short: I'm going to try to treat this place more like a garden. My various logs are seedlings, posts like these are, I suppose trees or patches of cultivated land (I'm woefully unprepared to riff on gardening terminology, to be honest).

And if you're interested in digital gardens yourself: go and read the above linked article by Maggie Appleton. It's exhaustive and informative and should tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about the concept of a digital garden.