First Season in the Digital Garden
4 days ago
Like many, I’ve found Obsidian to be the perfect sweet spot of a notes taking application: simple enough to get started, but almost infinitely customizable and extensible enough to allow me to make it my own and give it superpowers. I use it for daily notes, as a scratch pad, for keeping book notes, keeping track of processes for work, the list goes on… and I sync it between all my devices using SyncThing. In fact, I’m typing up the first draft of this post up in Obsidian on my iPad.
Writing notes and having them on any device I use is tremendously helpful for being able to start and build on ideas with ease, but they’re all private and often end up being fairly static. But taking notes and squirreling them away doesn’t provide much incentive to make revisions, connections, or updates. What if some of these ideas were cultivated in public? Enter the digital garden.
Maggie Appleton published a wonderful essay that dives deep into the concept of the “digital gardening” that has grown in popularity over the last few years, but has origins from decades ago. I highly recommended you give it a read because it covers everything I’m trying to (and she’s created a beautiful site to boot), but a personal definition that resonates with me is:
A public place to cultivate ideas in a messy, ever-changing fashion.
Instead of having a highly-curated set of rare posts, focus on publishing often, don’t be afraid of editing, updating, or deleting. Just like in Obsidian, develop connections, and if you’ve got the know-how, make your notes more lively and fun over time. Maggie writes:
The conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and InstaTwitBook is fleeting – they’re only concerned with self-assertive immediate thoughts that rush by us in a few moments.1
I’ve always had a hard time with feed-based sites like Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook. Sometimes I visit with the hope that I’ll learn something, see a call to action, or find something hilarious to share, but more often than not find myself engulfed in the firehose of content and come out the other side dazed and dissatisfied. A digital garden feels much more human-centric, a place where you can do a bit of work here and there to make things slightly better instead of spending hours on polishing something only to never have it see the light of day.
To lower the friction from idea → note → post, this site is built using Astro (and using the wonderful Barebones template from SuperWebThemes). It allows me to drop in a Markdown file into a folder and have it be published as a page. This feels like the perfect connection between Obsidian and this site. I hope to build on the simplicity of the design by giving it a little extra “whimsy”, building on a rough design palette and adding the ability to include code-based sketches for something dynamic.
So, here goes nothing. Topics might include: digging into DIY electronics (incoming note on my journey into custom-built keyboards), architecture + design, cycling, climate change, more human approaches to technology, and parenthood.