what is it?

A digital garden is a space to learn in public without the pressure of writing polished pieces like one would for a personal blog. It is a collection of thoughts, highlights, clippings, annotations, summaries, notes, and the like that is tended to and evolves over time.

where to go next

• jennypng: my friend who inspired me to make my garden public
• Hermitage: inspiration for my note categorizations; looking at this garden made the purpose of digital gardening click for me
• Andy's working notes: great explanations of the principles of note-taking
• Derek Sivers: started the /now page, which I've adopted for my home page

notes on data model

This digital garden publishes notes straight from my personal vault, which roughly follows the principles of Obsidian as a second brain (I started there, but it's evolved alongside my personal workflows throughout the years). It is set up as follows:

• no folder structure
• each note has frontmatter
  • topic: linked to a signpost file, which uses dataview to query and render backlinks (e.g., literature); I sometimes manually sort the links into categories
  • tag: identifies its digital garden mapping, as well as any specialized tags (e.g., book, show, etc.)

references & further reading

• Networked Thought
• What are digital gardens?
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet