#notes/content-management #topic/digital-gardens
Digital Gardens
About
What is a digital garden? In short, it's a website where someone shares knowledge in development. It's both a personal wiki and a blog, a place where one is wrong publicly and refines their ideas (and pages) over time.
It's a place of discovery where your interests take focus. You learn, write, rest, and then return to learn and write some more. Unlike most traditional "blogs," your entries might change as you grow in your understanding of the things you write about.
You might think of it as your personal note-taking system that is slightly formalized for public view, though not written for a public audience explicitly. People have called it a "second brain" or "digital commonplace book."
I am the audience for my digital garden and I come here to explore ideas and document what I know; however, I'm publishing it to the web to share with others and provide a place for them to explore my ideas, too. I'm here to work on writing skills, iterate, and be vulnerable.
Tools
Every gardener needs tools to build and maintain their plots. The tools you use for your garden may be different than mine. Generally, you'll need some kind of note-taking system and a website/web host to put it online.
My tools:
- Obsidian (note taking software)
- Github (deployment workflow from Obsidian to Netlify that assists in converting the content from Markdown to HTML)
- Netlify (web host)
- Dreamhost (this is where I bought my domain name)
- See Purpose and Guidelines for the full list of tools in my personal knowledge management system (PKMS)
Suggestions from folks who have been doing this longer than I have:
Examples
The Obsidian Garden Gallery provides a list of gardens published online from Obsidian.
Best practices / lessons learned
I will start adding these as I update these pages so this list will grow over time! I started this digital garden in December 2024, and I have a black thumb, so there is much room to grow.
May 4, 2025
- Be patient with how long it takes to flesh things out. I had a lot of ideas at once and did a pretty good job at capturing what knowledge I'd like to capture, but it was a bit overwhelming to suddenly have all these pages to fill out fully (like this one, which I had already started building before I made all those). No pressure to get things done all at once. Let the thoughts percolate over time.
- The pace at which I update my PKMS is not reflective of the pace at which I am learning or gaining knowledge. I don't rush to this to update every time I learn something and my approach is and has always been to build it out slowly as I have time among other projects and things going on in my life. I know this and yet I feel weird that the site does not always accurately reflect the currency of my understanding of things! Especially the new pages where I definitely know more than what's written there!
- Don't feel pressured to increase expectations of yourself. This has been a good lesson to learn. Although in some ways I think this site may end up serving as a portfolio piece somewhere, it's not actually a professionally driven site. This is a personal project that I decided to do because I was interested in taking on this challenge. There is no reason to pressure myself to do "more" unless I want to. I don't mind drifting in and out. I am learning how to be okay with being or appearing wrong online, either due to lack of knowledge or outdated information. Simply starting a list of topics is pretty cool in itself, I don't need to be at the "end of this site" (whatever that means) immediately! (though I want to be, I think it will be great!)
Supporting my learning
- Everyone else's digital garden I can find on the internet (linked in my are.na channel below)
- Reflecting over time I hope
Max's brainstorming
This is some brainstorming I did before setting up my digital garden. I thought about how I could tie ideas of real-world gardening and landscaping into this, read about hypertext art/expression, and browsed a bunch of other digital gardens for inspiration. IRL I have a black thumb and very little gardening experience.
Garden freestyle:
trees, flowers, paths, lawns, birds & butterflies, weeds, soil, water, rocks, walls, steps, hedges
does my digital garden have walls?
- network of interconnected notes & pages
- non-linear navigation and clear pathways through content
- personal exploration & learning
- frequent updates/revision history
- link to external sources
- appealing design
digital garden - space to cultivate thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, iterative manner (rather than strictly structured)
Ideas:
- paths = structured paths through content
- lawns = patches of related things
- notes from sources (books, podcast episodes, articles, etc)
- 1 per book/thing, write quotes & thoughts
- birds & butterflies - thoughts from external sources
- fragments - loose notes, thoughts, ideas, etc
- 1 per thing
- flowers - ideas that grow when it rains
- synthesis - connections between notes & fragments, reviews of sources, etc - ideally connecting different things and referencing them like in school.
- trees - ideas have taken root
- stage of tree growth = how formulated an idea it is vs scratch notes still
- (like animal crossing)
Purpose and Guidelines
walky.space/digitalgarden
Links & Quotes
The ObsidianMD subreddit has been a vital source of tips & tricks. My are.na channel (embedded above) includes links to other digital garden sites. Here I'll include articles that have influenced how my garden evolves.
Digital Garden Terms of Service
Link: github.com/max-writes/digital-garden-tos
I have a right to be wrong or incomplete in my Digital Garden, either due to paucity of time or knowledge. You will not hold this, or my readership, against me because I will keep learning, with your help. Everything in the Digital Garden is a living document and I will retract or rephrase things I no longer agree with.
Organising a personal Knowledge Management system
Link: adubrg.medium.com/organising-a-personal-knowledge-management-system
Growing up and changing is part of the human experience and the tools that accompany you on this journey such as your PKM should follow that same logic.
How I built myself a Digital Garden
Link: timrodenbroeker.de/digital-garden
With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience. With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.
Tom Critchlow
The Digital Garden is a kind of second brain (I took the wording from Tiago Forte). But it is also a place to wander, to think and reflect, to engage with one’s own thoughts and ideas. A kind of culinary exercise of the mind (according to a phrase by Richard David Precht). It helps me a lot to have a central place where I can file my ideas and, above all, find them again.
Transforming Chaos into Clarity: Template for Projects and Hobbies
Link: medium.com/@m_faizan/transforming-chaos-into-clarity-template-for-projects-and-hobbies
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE
WHY?
HOW?
MEASURE
COMPLETION
REWARD
WHAT I DID?
TIMELINE
(Date/Action)
After creating this, I set a reminder to be reminded every Saturday evening to sit and write. That’s all I’ve done. And for the last four weeks, I have been working on this project. You can see my profile and check how many articles I have published.
Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes
Link: maggieappleton.com/basb
I also find the metaphor of a “second brain” troubling in that it doesn’t speak to the significance of embodied cognition and tacit knowledge in how human cognition works. Filling up a “digital brain” as if it were a filing cabinet is highly unlikely to lead to meaningful knowledge and wisdom.