Digital Gardening
I have the intention of turning this space into a digital garden. In the linked blog post, Maggie Appleton describes the history and internal details of digital gardening.1 In short, digital gardening is a process that “[emphasises] the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public.”
Appleton describes Six Patterns of Gardening - features that make “a website a digital garden as opposed to just another blog”:
- Topography over Timelines
- Continuous Growth
- Imperfection & Learning in Public
- Playful, Personal, and Experimental
- Intercropping & Content Diversity
- Independent Ownership
The feature that appeals to me the most is Continuous Growth. I want to get my thoughts up here, without worrying if I have completely polished essays. With Gardening, “what [I] publish [can] always [be] open to revision and expansion.”
“Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it’s both intimate and public, weird and welcoming.”
I intend to categorize posts by how polished or complete they are, and will include posted and last updated timestamps.
Another key component to gardening is richly interconnected content, as opposed to timeline content (Topography over Timelines). For now, the index blog page on this website will likely still be organized chronologically by last updated date, however I eventually would like to add a tag system to make the landscape more topographical.
I encourage everyone to check out Appletons’s post on Digital Gardening.
1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this post are from https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history