What is a digital garden?
A garden is not a blog. Notes are connected by links instead of sorted by date, and they don't have to be done.
- A digital garden is non-linear: notes are connected by links, not sorted by date
- Notes have maturity levels (seedling, budding, evergreen) and are allowed to grow
- Learning in public, even before a thought is finished
A digital garden is a counterpoint to the blog. Where a blog is chronological and produces single, finished articles, a garden lives on the connections between notes. Content grows, gets tended, changes.
Maturity levels
Each note has a maturity:
- Seedling: just planted, a raw idea.
- Budding: growing, being tended, taking shape.
- Evergreen: matured, a note that holds up.
The level shows on every note. A seedling note doesn’t have to be finished. An evergreen didn’t arrive that way. I rewrote it over months.
Why?
Because a blog asks too much. Every post has to be “done”, or I don’t publish it, which means I often don’t publish anything. In the garden I can think without being done.
How it works here
On denniskummer.de, the garden is its own area next to the blog. The blog holds finished articles and news. The garden holds the sketches and anything I’m still working on.