Define fluid and stable content

There are two elemental types of content in any digital garden: fluid and stable. Gardeners will make their own distinctions about the two, but a distinction is necessary because of the differing approaches one might take with entry and upkeep. To merge these types into the same workflow invites confusion.

Fluid content is in-progress. It’s unpolished, uncategorized raw material. It might comprise a bookmark to an online article, a wild thought jotted down while walking, a journal entry, or a project status update. The chief requirement of fluid content is that entry has the fewest barriers possible.

Stable content is curated. It’s polished, thoughtfully organized, and interconnected. It might comprise a blog article, a quote with attribution, or an evergreen note. The chief requirement of stable content is that it satisfies its purpose (to inform, to teach, to document, etc).

A digital gardener may not publish a garden that contains both of these content types, but they must define the difference, at least for themselves.

A Separate Greenhouse

Entering the gardening analogy, fluid content belongs in a greenhouse. It’s the seed or the tender sprout that’s not yet ready for public exposure.

A perfectly acceptable option to digital gardening is to greenhouse one’s content elsewhere. I might keep all my fluid notes in a note-taking app that syncs data between my laptop and phone. When a note is mature enough for planting (though perhaps not fully mature), I can copy the content into my publishing system; put it in the digital garden.

This is standard process for most blogs. I appreciate how a separate greenhouse keeps thinking and publishing separate, allowing for an editorial step before content goes live. However, this introduces a publishing gate that can limit one’s learning in public. Unless the gardener doesn’t care to share, it’s also likely that one will end up with multiple greenhouses from which to retrieve seeds. For example, a gardener might put idea-seeds in the Twitter greenhouse and journal entries in Facebook.

A Local Greenhouse

Instead of storing fluid and stable content in separate greenhouses, a digital garden might manage its own greenhouse. A spur-of-the-moment idea might be published with a minimum of fuss to the same repository where polished content resides but only be displayed after the user marks it ready. WordPress achieves this concept with the idea of a drafted copy. The bold gardener may even publish fluid content as-is but mark it appropriately to distinguish greenhouse plants from their more mature cousins.

Wikis operate in this fasion by allowing users to create stubs for further development. I appreciate this approach because it prevents content from piling up behind an editorial gate. A nuanced web design might allow fluid content to sit alongside stable content for cutting-edge learning and exploration.