About My Garden

This is my digital garden where I get to plant my ideas and help them grow. Blogs always felt too linear to me. I’d have to put in so much effort to get things perfect before publishing and then it’s set in stone. I learned about digital gardening from people like Maggie Appleton and Pete Millspaugh.

This is my space and the goal is to not wait for things to be perfect. Another common idea in this space is to work with the garage door up or learn in public. With this format I get to tend to my ideas and help them reach maturity. I get to change my mind as I gather new information. I get to continuously improve.

There are a couple of post formats taken from various places of inspiration.

A Captain’s Log is the closest thing to a traditional blog post because sometimes I don’t know where else put my thoughts other than a summary of the past little while. But also because I’m a fan of RSS feeds and as far as I’m aware there isn’t a good solution to sending out updates for a digital garden. The idea is my Captain’s Log will also serve as a changelog to highlight any revisions I make. That is if anybody is strange enough to even want to subscribe.

A Clipping is a link to something interesting by someone else. It could be a cool fact. It could be a neat article. It could be a fun game. But the idea is I can just share it and add some of my own commentary in a constructive way without worrying about making it into my own thing. I’ll be trying to follow Simon Willison’s approach to running a link blog.

I still need to come up with a name for short things that I write. That means it’s not just a link to somebody else’s work.

When I really get down to it and synthesize a long form piece of writing it will most likely be called an Essay. Unless I can come up with a more clever name for it. But I’m going to focus on developing my writing habit before I make plans for that.

I’m also planning on using a Show and Tell to write about any of my projects when I get around to finishing up some of them. I need to remind myself that it doesn’t need to be perfect, just worked on, before I share it. I also don’t know if this needs it’s own format yet.

I can change this at any time. The most important thing is to write something reasonably often and come back and tend my garden when I can.