digital gardens
the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit
I got on a number of peculiar and quirky internet tangents last month, one of which is the concept of a digital garden.
I first discovered the idea from the blog of Rahim Li, a software engineer from Azerbaijan and based in Germany, while I was researching about the concept of a Minecraft Forever World. This is referenced and played into my blog post about choosing presence over speed, which was naturally influenced by my viewing of A Minecraft Movie.
I haven’t opened Minecraft in a few months, I digress, but it’s hilariously how one thing could lead so inconspicuously to the next.
On his home page, he links to Maggie Appleton’s article where she explores the history, mindset, ethos, and overall concept of the digital garden as a decentralised and developing knowledge system — something that has existed for at least two decades now, only occasionally resurfaces within certain internet circles, and never quite so to the public eye.
For the people who are very much into digital gardening, I’m reminded of Circe in Greek mythology, cultivating their own self-sustainable island independent of civilisation where nobody is explicitly invited but everybody is inherently welcome. The only way to access these islands are via accidental rafts of SEO or backlinking across neighbouring websites — which is exactly what happened to me when I typed ‘minecraft forever world’ on the search bar.
Also referred to as ‘personal wikis’, digital gardens are free form, sparely updated, work-in-progress networks of information that tend not to be organised by publication date. It garners similar sentiment but opposite executoin to a personal blog, which usually presents a set of refined articles in reverse chronological order (see: my substack!) and instead an exploratory, not-so-organised, imperfect and evolving beast that grows as the user does.
(Maggie explains it better than I ever could so honestly just explore her wonderful garden to get a taste of what I mean.)
I was so enamoured by her beautifully unformulaic yet structured approach, how each idea started out as a little sprout, developing into fully-fledged trees and sometimes connecting with unrelated adjacent topics to drive a whole new perspective.
This interests me because, in my view, there are two situations where creativity bears the most sublime fruit: 1) When there are limits in what you can do [e.g. working off a short story prompt, having limited ingredients in the fridge, needing to transport heavy items without a trolley) and 2) When two entirely disconnected fields of interest somehow intersect, allowing someone to bring unique insights and approaches that positively delight both fields (TierZoo, a YouTube channel that blends zoology/animal knowledge and video game style/classic GameFAQs commentary - comes to mind as a marvelous modern blend of education + shitpost).
I love notetaking. It’s an integral part of learning. I attribute a lot of my high school success to incessant notetaking. I’ve tried to make it more digitally-driven across university and early work with Notion dashboards and Obsidian systems, but these two never quite landed due to how much time gets spend in making Notion look pretty (and being horrendously slow on mobile) and the markdown language + tagging system being rather unintuitive to me at the time. I currently just shove everything in OneNote/Apple Notes and it works but isn’t how I want to operate. I’ve thought of making Notion or Obsidian work again.
There are a ton of digital gardens using Notion and Obsidian as a base. This page on Exploratory Data Analysis & Visualisation comes to mind, a page I could certainly learn a little from (or even make my own website which can explore a similar topic).
((Not that I have any topics I know expansively enough to build a website or guide for — which then again, perhaps via building said website, I am able to develop that expertise while creating a resource to build beginners up to date level. Now that’s a cool project.))
Until then, I’ve built my own digital garden, following the impeccably made website setup guide by Tiny Projects and taking inspiration from the format of Alex West’s blog roll.
It is available, hopefully forever, on savtaz.com.
There is a Home page that introduces me;
a Now page that more or less mirrors my Substack now page;
a Contact page in case you’d like to send me a million bucks;
a Log to track changes made to the website;
and finally, the Garden, as an unstructured log of posts and ideas that are too short to be a Substack article, too long for a Twitter/Substack note, and require more permanence than an Instagram story.
It’s my own corner of the internet that sits independent of social media, and yes, that includes our favourite orange app here because Substack is a social media corporation too.
I don’t know how much I’ll actually tend to said garden because, truth be told, it was such a pain to set up and would only become increasingly more difficult to maintain. I have coding knowledge, sure, but not HTML/CSS and what I do know is entirely self-taught and maintained. I spent a solid 6-8 hours over a few days amalgamating some reinforced plastic beams in VS Code, pulled at least two brain nerves getting my domain setup, and got embarrassingly intimate with ChatGPT to iron out my styling options.
Whether I actually cultivate savtaz.com as its own expanding digital garden of ideas and columns and wonderfulness, or tear out personal details to use it as an additional portfolio/resume page — remains to be seen. I’m very proud though of my self-created coffee and blueberry pancake themed website and don’t regret building it. If anything, it’s a reminder that I can, you know, just do things — proof that I can create something not just physical, but digital, with my own bare hands.
substacks i’ve hit that like button on recently:
How Joy Gets Killed When It Becomes a To-Do - by
✅Why We Avoid the Things That Make Us the Happiest - also by
🐎the art of loving inconveniently - by
👻The One Thing You Must Do in Your 20s Before Your Next Relationship. - by
🎨are we ‘too soft’, or is everyone just an asshole - by
🦌
While I have technically left the paid subscription open on journaling in public, I’m not the biggest fan of paywalling my work. Instead, I’ve set up a buymeacoffee.com page so if you’d like to show support one way or another — any brown beverages donations would be very much appreciated! ☕☕☕