#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 or see the embed below.
• 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:

Learn in Public

In reading about digital gardens and their philosophies, I keep seeing the "learn in public" approach come up, which is something I've been trying to do better with this site. (I am still learning to be consistent with it to get the most value.)

For me, there are a few reasons to learn in public, as scary as it can be to be vulnerable about how much (or little) you know, and to put incomplete thoughts online assigned to your name.

• Learn loudly and without structure
  • Document as you go: TIL, notes, book notes, "huh" or "a-ha" moments, etc.
  • This is something I struggle with sometimes, but with my system it's easy to keep structures depending on what I need using tags, links, properties, and so on.
  • By encouraging myself to publish informal thoughts and partial exploration, it's easy to draft up an update and polish it for the site so I can keep the flows going.
• Emphasis on growth
  • I don't have to wait for everything to be perfect since it will always be in progress. (And it will probably always be a little messy.) It's more of an agile approach which I need to get better at in my professional life too so this is good practice!
  • Because the notes are always a work in progress, it feels more like my learning will always be a work in progress. There's no point where I will know everything and in some ways it's easier to celebrate milestones of growth than it is to "wait until it's done."
• Community education
  • If anyone is in the same spot as I am/was for anything I've written about, my site could offer perspective or instructions in a moment when someone might need it.
  • When I add a mechanism for feedback my site will fit all the 'learn in public' criteria, inviting corrections and thoughts from others.
• Max's knowledge archive
  • It becomes a network of knowledge nuggets and insights from my experience and learning.
  • As I review and add to it over time, this helps reinforce memory and deepens my understanding of the topics and how they connect.

Learn in Public

Link: www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

Guess what? It’s not about reaching as many people as possible with your content. If you can do that, great, remember me when you’re famous. But chances are that by far the biggest beneficiary of you trying to help past you is future you. If others benefit, that’s icing.

Tools

• Digital garden: Obsidian (content management), GitHub, Netlify (hosting)
• Notes and record keeping: DrawNote, Google drive, are.na, paper journals, clippings.io (grab Kindle highlights), raindrop.io (bookmarks)
  • Seasons bingo journal
  • Art journal & coloring book journals
  • Journal Systems
• Life tracking: Daylio, Finch, personal budget, Google calendar
• Life sharing: Neocities sites, Maxwrites, Letterboxd, Storygraph, MyAlbum, Pencilbooth, Shapchat (private), are.na
  • Digital art tools: Canva, BandLab, Phomemo, Pixilart, CapCut, Infinite Painter

Content management

See also: Knowledge Capture Flows

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)
• ideas (all files that are just a brain fart of ideas)
• plex (Plex library guide for myself to track where things are stored and also help with reorganizing)
• seasons (seasonal based to do, notes, projects, reflection, some may move to the garden)
• templates (my templates for my obsidian setup)

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 links to plugin documentation
• various stats pages made from the contribution graph plugin

digital garden (drafts)

Items that enter the digital garden are usually marked with the source or inspiration. (I started doing this about 5 months into maintaining the garden.) These include thoughts and ideas that I want to expand on, and potentially add to the public garden.

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 formatting 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/ (stuff I want to explore further)
  • topic/ (subtopics or keywords related to the notes)
  • path/ (entry points to content)
  • type/ (weeknotes, instructional content, maybe some others to come)
• Properties
  • Properties are primarily used to help filter Datacards or Dataviews.

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, anxiety 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
  • Link (drops template text in for me to edit)
  • Quote (template text)
  • Origin footnote (adds formatting so I can include a source or inspiration)
• Zine Therapy
  • Seasonal page (this generates a template diary page for Zine Therapy survey and emotion diary entries)
  • 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