Digital garden

Located in: Tools
Status: 🌿 Budding

What is a Digital Garden?

A digital garden is an alternative to a blog. It's organized around relationships and links instead of being time based.

It's constantly growing and evolving. The notes aren't refined or complete, they are published as half-finished thoughts. Overall, you can expect the notes to be less rigid and perfect than blog posts.

This also means you'll see my thought process, research, and refining as it happens. This approach resonates with me, my approach is Default to transparency.

Notes that are very raw can be found in the Inbox.

For most notes, I will call out the status of the note. It will be one of (based on Maggie Appleton):

  • 🌰 seed for content that's a placeholder
  • 🌱 seedling for very rough and early ideas
  • 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
  • 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).

Resources

Tools

The content of the digital garden is created and edited using Obsidian. Alternatives I explored before deciding to go with Obsidian:

  • Roam Research - I didn't explore this tool too much but it has quite a following (see the seed round they raised). My concerns: the price tag ($15/month), and the data is stored within Roam.
  • Foam - Uses a combination of VS Code plugins to create similar functionality to Roam or Obsidian. I ran into issues getting it to generate my digital garden site.
  • Notion - Notion has been my main repository of knowledge for the past 2 years. I'm moving this knowledge over to Obsidian but will still use Notion as a central repository.
  • Evernote - I've used Evernote for over 10 years. There's a lot of knowledge stored in my Evernote but I found it hard to organize and group my knowledge.

This website is generated using 11ty with some customizations to support generating the content.