planting the digital garden

i’ve been keeping notes in Obsidian for a while now. thousands of them. some are polished, most aren’t. the idea of making them public has been rattling around in my head, and now that the site exists it felt like time to actually do it.

this post is about how the digital garden works — what it is, how it’s structured, and why i went this route instead of a wiki or a second blog.

what’s a digital garden

if you haven’t run into the concept before, a digital garden is somewhere between a blog and a wiki. notes don’t have to be finished. they don’t have a publish date in any meaningful sense. they grow over time, get linked to other notes, and exist in various states of doneness.

the metaphor is the thing — you plant seeds, tend them, and some of them turn into something. others just sit there. that’s fine. the point isn’t to ship polished essays, it’s to think in public and let the connections between ideas do the interesting work.

the structure

every note has a status in its frontmatter: seedling, growing, or evergreen. seedlings are rough — maybe a sentence, a link, a half-formed thought. growing notes have some substance but aren’t done. evergreen notes are as finished as they’re going to get, which still doesn’t mean perfect.

notes link to each other freely. that’s the whole point — the garden is a graph, not a timeline. you wander through it, follow links, find things you weren’t looking for. it’s the opposite of a reverse-chronological feed.

i keep categories loose on purpose. rigid taxonomies break the second you have a note that fits in two places. tags exist but i try not to overthink them.

why not a wiki

i thought about it. mediawiki, wiki.js, even a flat-file wiki. but i already had a Jekyll site and i already had Obsidian notes in markdown. adding another system felt wrong. the garden lives alongside the blog because they’re made of the same stuff — markdown files with frontmatter, rendered by Jekyll.

the difference is tone and expectation. blog posts are articles. garden notes are notes. you’ll know which is which.

what’s growing right now

mostly stuff about tooling, workflow, and the web. some programming notes. a few things about music and whatever else i’m interested in at the time. the interests page gives you a map; the garden gives you the territory.

i’m not going to garden in public and pretend the rough notes aren’t rough. that’s the deal. you get to see the work in progress.

this post is referenced from the colophon page.