#path/faq

Max's Digital Garden

This PKM (personal knowledge management) system will collect and do the following for me:

• Reflection and learning journal as a writer and using a PKMS
• A place to curate my portfolio
• Create a playground for new ideas and learning
• Gather my bibliography of writing resources
• Document my personal writing best practice (and cite sources)
• Life updates, reflection, ideas
• Mind mapping, connecting ideas, building bridges I may not have otherwise seen
• Inspiration from within

How to use this site

There is no intended linear way to browse or read content on this site. You can navigate multiple ways:

• Use the search bar to see if there is anything on this site that interests you based on your own keywords.
• Select a tag when you see it to browse all pages.
• Start with a path from the homepage
• Use the navigation bar to browse pages divided by level of depth or information source. You can find a description of what each of these sections means on the homepage:

Tools

• Digital garden: Obsidian (content management), GitHub, Netlify (hosting)
• Notes and record keeping: DrawNote, Google drive, are.na, paper journals
  • Seasons bingo journal
  • Hobonichi weekly planner
  • Art journal
• Life tracking: Daylio, Finch, personal budget, Google calendar
• Life sharing: Neocities sites, Maxwrites, Letterboxd, Storygraph, Canva, MyAlbum, Substack, Pencilbooth, Shapchat (private), are.na

Content management

Obsidian folder structure

Here is an outline of the folder structure I use in Obsidian:

• Use the 0 (zero) folder for life stuff. this is all private.
• Use the digital garden folder for drafts and creating empty pages/ideas.
• Move items to the garden when they are ready to publish to the site. (These items may be in progress, publish once you feel no anxiety about sharing a half-formed thought.)
• When anything is updated in or added to the garden folder, modify Updates to describe what was done.
• Once a month or as needed, publish via Digital Garden plugin (plugin website).

0 folder (private)

This stuff will probably never see the public.

Folder structure:

• daily (daily notes)
• health (keep up with meds, personal appointments, etc)
• ideas (all files that are just a brain fart of ideas)
• responsibilities (taking care of my home, car, etc)
• seasons (seasonal based to do, notes, projects, reflection, some may move to the garden)
• templates (my templates for my obsidian setup)
• zenny (taking care of my cat, appointments, blood work results, etc)

this folder is also where I keep

• my homepage, which loads when I open Obsidian and thanks to the homepage plugin I can have a separate one on mobile vs desktop (plugin website)
• a snippets file which holds my cheat sheet for markdown and other script.

digital garden (drafts)

Items that enter the digital garden

• add tags below file name
• ​the title uses h1
• other headers use h2, h3 etc.
• if you are adding a previously created file, add created date at the bottom under a horizontal rule

subfolders:

• notes are topics
  • birds & butterflies - thoughts from external sources, pieces of my history, things I've learned about this, etc.

• fragments - loose notes, thoughts, ideas, etc. fragments are sometimes drafts which become notes or trees.
  • 1 per thing
  • flowers - ideas that grow when it rains

garden (published)

same folder structure as above, including:

• fragments - loose notes, thoughts, ideas
• notes - topics
  • i try my best to link these to other areas in the garden, but frankly it'll never be a complete and true representation of everything that is linked. I'll review them periodically to add more links where I find them.
• trees - ideas have taken root
  • synthesis - connections between notes & fragments, reviews of sources, etc - ideally connecting different things and referencing them like in school.
  • stage of tree growth = how formulated an idea it is vs scratch notes still (like animal crossing)
  • library - sources (books, podcast episodes, articles, etc)
  • 1 note per book/thing, write quotes and notes

Items are ready for the garden website when:

• you've previewed the note for spacing etc (reading mode)
• you added the publish property to the page
• all sources have proper citing if you know it
• you're ready to share a half baked thought without anxiety
• the site is not having any deployment issues

Grouping

This describes how content is grouped using tags and Obsidian features. (Obsidian-only items are not available on the website version of the garden.)

• Each main topic page in the notes area gets a # notes/something tag.
  • Subtopics and keywords, format: # topic/something - these might have their own pages, or they might not
• Tag structure
  • notes/
  • topic/
  • max/
  • path/ (entry points to content)
  • type/ (weeknotes, instructional content, maybe some others to come)

Obsidian only:

• Use bookmarks for stuff I use in everyday life (eg grocery list, to do)
• Use tags as status indicators for quick a quick list of posts (eg, books in progress, currently writing, so I can pull them up easily)

Templates

Here are the templates I've created for myself in my Obsidian setup.

• Diary entries (insert into notes as needed)
  • Anger diary, therapy survey (part of my self-therapy practice)
  • Book report (questions about a book I just finished)
  • EOY and Decade questions (from Steph Ango)
  • Now (inserts template text for my Now page)
• Template pages
  • Book page (uses the Book Search plugin to create a page with metadata for a specific book - plugin website)
  • Seasonal to do (I create one each season, this has the categories set up for me) - Living Seasons
• Formatting help for consistency
  • External link (drops template text in for me to edit)
  • Quote (template text)
• Zine Therapy
  • Survey (I fill this out every other week or so to capture what I'm feeling, thinking, processing, bad habits and patterns, etc.)
  • Pre-zine survey (this helps me collect all my reflection over the last few months and think about it)

Plugins

Core

• Audio recorder
• Backlinks (show links from other files in the current file)
• Bookmarks
• Canvas (create visual notes and connect ideas)
• Command palette (Ctrl+P to open command list)
• Daily notes
• File recovery
• Files
• Graph view
• Note composer (merge or split notes)
• Outgoing links
• Outline
• Page preview
• Properties view
• Quick switcher
• Random note
• Search
• Sync
• Tags View
• Templates
• Word count

Community

• Automatic Table of Contents
• Buttons
• Dataview
• Digital Garden (used for my publishing workflow)
• Homepage (customized Obsidian homepage desktop vs mobile)
• Image Gallery
• Tasks