Reasons to migrate to a digital garden

In December I will make a change to the structure of my website that will break nearly every existing link. Here’s why.

My website has evolved out of my own emerging needs. By now it’s become a small ecosystem of web pages and services, only a portion of which are used by my Internet buddies.

It began in 2019 for two purposes: an outlet to continue a writing habit started in my MBA program, and a place to share our family’s experiences for posterity.

As my blog count began to push fifty, I became aware that no single theme had risen to the surface. I’ve written tutorials from my software explorations, open letters to government entities, stories from family trips, kingdom manifestos and more. At the same time I started exploring the concept of a digital garden from Maggie Appleton’s History of the Digital Garden.

The garden analogy’s emphasis on organic thought growth instead of static, time-stamped works matched my own meandering writing and what I love most about other’s websites (esp. Matt Webb). I have no desire to build an audience around a specific topic; I’m growing cross-domain ideas. In my imagination the garden also became synonymous with heavily interlinked writing, called backlinks, where ideas could be explored in their wider context by jumping up and down the navigational tree. The backlink concept, along with the traditional tagging system, is a perfect fit for my analytical mind.

My site’s evolution towards a garden began with the introduction of a notes type. I kept my traditional blog-style posts, adding only a little organization to make them easier to navigate, and added a new section called Notes. As I began to add notes to my site and implement the backlinks concept I began to notice benefits to the new approach.

• I could clarify my thoughts under a broad category more easily. A series of notes on evangelism was instrumental in clarifying my thoughts on the subject and helped me craft a short presentation. While I might have written a single post to capture the list of paradigm shifts, writing them as atomic thoughts helped me separate the ideas from their structure. That little bit of separation helped me analyze similarities and differences among the notes and adjacent ideas and resulted in a better list IMO.

• I could publish faster and with less concern for mistakes. Notes are easily generated at almost daily speed. Posts were created a little more slowly, but they also sat in draft mode until I had ten or more waiting for review and publish. Notes that circle about a theme organically form a broad structure which might qualify as a post, but I don’t need to refine the final result along the way.

Many writers who use organic note systems grow them privately and compose separate final drafts for public use. There are good reasons to write this way, but I am choosing to conduct all my writing in public. The small risk of plagiarism is worth being able to view and share anything I’ve written, with whatever formatting I choose, no apps needed.

As I developed my own notes I became aware that the voice of others was missing or buried in isolated quotes and hyperlinks. Inspired by Nick Trombley I decided that, even though my garden is primarily to grow my own ideas, the context is incomplete without better references to source material. This has inspired a new type of content which, because of it’s unchanging nature, I’m calling stones.

My existing notes, in the garden analogy, are moving to plants. Unlike stones, plants are subject to growth, pruning, transplantation, and death. I will indicate my sense of what state a plant is in, from seedlings to evergreens, so that it is more obvious when a piece of content is likely to change or move and when it’s there to stay (probably).

A bunch of disconnected plants and stones does not a garden make, so a new overarching gardens type will compose clumps together. Plants may be directly interconnected with other plants and stones, but when there is a developing system of thought it will be placed into its own garden. Some of my posts already qualify, as well as some aggregate notes that were called MOCs.

My log page is largely unchanged, except for the addition of year and month into the URL. Posts will disappear entirely, and their content moved into the new plants type. Where my posts are composed of many plants, they will move to the gardens type and possibly decomposed into a plant series. There are several posts which are being put into the plants category as evergreens.

I’ll prune the garden when I have time so that the update will be more pleasing but there’ll still be untamed places and weeds that I’ll clear up as time goes on. The biggest pruning work is converting all my blog-style posts into their more organic plant representations. I’m excited for how this will help me spot the concepts from which these posts stem but my collection of works are not equally easy to migrate and I anticipate hurdles. I also hope to redesign portions of my site to visually support the garden analogy, but that will be an ongoing process since I’m not the visual-design type.