Digital Garden

Digital Gardens is a website concept which resembles a public, curated knowledge bas or wiki. Or maybe public, constantly changing notebook. Some of the best digital gardens are gwern.net by Gwern Branwen, Everything I know by Nikita Voloboev and Andy’s working notes by Andy Matuschak. Their common denominator is that they grow over the time, similar to gardens. It’s up to the gardener they look like.

Topics

Digital gardens naturally lean towards the concept of wikis or knowledge bases. My personal notes are my knowledge base and a source of truth. They’re always with me and don’t need internet access - feat which no website can have. Understandably I don’t want to repeat myself and copy-paste them here. I discovered, however, that continuous refinement of thoughts is beneficial and moving the notes to the blog gives them a structure which they didn’t have earlier.

Digital notes aren’t the only source of new articles. I have two other methods of storing my thoughts for future use, because I can’t imagine using any form of keyboard to quickly jot down something about a book I’m reading:

• I use a paper: I have several notebooks, each used on a different occasion;
• I record myself and leave the recording as a note to myself on Signal² for hassle-free access on my other devices.

These notes to myself are usually only floating ideas or unrefined stream of thoughs. When I re-write them I edit them, add a lot of context and sometimes I just remove them, because after third or fourth thought they turned out unnecessary or straight false.

What lands in my garden? Everything which I find useful to the others. In the past I tried to keep my blog 100% technical. It isn’t the case anymore, because my life isn’t 100% technical. There are so many things in this world that it would be a sin to pass them without a comment.

I don’t write for myself - I have my notes for this purpose. But there’s a certain pleasure in writing these articles. They also help me understand things better, because very often I have to delve into the subject to the level which I wasn’t aware that it exists. This is the moment when I sometimes realize the shalloweness of my understanding of the subject and discontinue the article.

And sometimes I simply lose an interest in certain articles and leave them unfinished. As much as I like finishing my pieces, I try not to worry about it too much.

These are newborn branches of my digital garden, which must be looked after with a special care. They are drafts, often in form of outlines. Because they’re public, readers must be aware that they are not looking at the final form of the article. This is where status taxonomy¹ comes in.

Content Organization

There are few ways in which I organize my garden because I doubt that only one way would work for most situations.

Status

I already told about status taxonomy which describes the lifetime of articles. There are 4 statuses:

• draft - an early stage of most of articles, usually an outline or a bunch of unfinished or poorly edited paragraphs. Articles might change drastically. Thoughts and ideas require additional verification. These pages are not included in the list of latest articles and in RSS feed.
• in progress - more-or-less coherent page, which you’ll be able to actually read and understand something. This step is sometimes called editing (I can’t afford hiring a professional editor, so I must do it myself). It’s not the final form, but pretty close. This status also includes always-unfinished pages.
• finished - finished piece. It doesn’t mean that it won’t receive any updates, but that I’m not actively working on it.
• rework - articles once finished, which need a big rework for some reason. Sometimes they’re outdated, sometimes they’re written in Polish and I intend to translate them soon.

Importance

On the main page there is a special section which shows the most important articles (or at least the ones which I judge to be as such). Articles on this list are sorted by relevancy: a coefficient which is calculated based on few other factors:

• article importance, in scale 0-10, which I set manually;
• the article’s age: newer articles with the same importance are more relevant than the older ones, up to some certain point in the past;
• existence or lack of certain categories or tags (for example, articles written in Polish are less relevant to the general audience).

Linking Content

Linking between articles is crucial for creating a site which resembles garden. I do it manually on a best-effort-basis. I think that generated connections between pages are soulless and only intended to keep readers longer on a website. I don’t monetize my thoughts so there’s no reason to waste your time; if there’s nothing related to the topic they’re browsing, so be it.

It’s very imperfect and cumberstone process, but this is part of gardener’s life, isn’t it?

Additional to hyperlinks, pages on similar topic are grouped together on the main page and with more fine-grained tags.

Removing content

Good gardeners know when to cut sloppy shoots. Removing and merging some of the older articles is necessary. Old news aren’t news anymore, some mini-series were discontinued, but look quite good when merged together (see: 1, 2). Or I’m inventing a new way to categorize things.

Unfortunately, moving/removing content breaks permalinks and bookmarks, assuming that someone have bookmarked my page.

I stopped worrying about it as much as I had worried in the past. I have lost hope in web as a medium to preserve things. Everything on web is ephemeral and should be treated as such. Projects such as Wayback Machine or archive.today do reasonably good job archiving web pages, but they are not silver bullets. They belong to third parties and these, by definition, cannot be trusted with your most precious personal data. In a perfect world browsers should be doing a better job bookmarking web pages.

This leaves us in a place where we have to save everything ourselves or be ready for the loss. I simply acknowledge this fact. I’m trying to preserve some content, but I’m not making any promises. I’m still thinking how to backup data after my death.

Anyway, what’s the point of preserving permalinks when content of pages isn’t set in stone (see previous section)?