Building My Digital Garden

Entering the realm of "Digital Gardens" you are bound to cross paths with this excellent post by Joel Hooks, "My blog is a digital garden, not a blog". That's it. This post is done 😅

Here are some take aways for me as I've been joining and observing conversations from others building their own gardens:

• A garden is a place where living things grow. I get to share raw and sometimes incomplete content. What a burden that lifts off ye ole shoulders!
• No more dates please. This was the first thing I noticed. I used to always look at the dates of posts to see whether or not they are still relevant. Most published content has a much longer shelf life than we give it credit for. Dates muddy things up. If a "post" needs to rely on a date because it is time-sensitive, tell me, don't let me guess.
• Drop the pagination. Paginating content assumes that everything is a "must-read" and that people have time to go through pages of content that is important to me, not necessarily them. Reality is closer that people will not page through my content, so if I want them to read something its up to me to put it where they can see it. This is content curation.
• Plants have life-cycles. Just like plants in a garden may die. Let your old content die. When the content is mature it might need transplanting, splicing, propagation. A digital garden is your permission to experiment. Be the mad digital botanist you want to be. If people love something, do more of it. If they hate it, get rid of it. If something grows beyond the boundaries of this garden, find it a new place to flourish.
• Ignore everything in this note so far and do you! Ultimately, your garden is your garden. Do what works for you. Grow what you want to grow.

With all of these ideas I was inspired to finally build my own digital garden. Now that I'm over the friction of the tools I get to play and make mistakes. I get to share as sparks turn into cohesive thoughts and when they don't. I get to learn and discover while doing things in public.

Be the mad digital botanist you want to be.