Digital Garden

Think of this digital garden as a cross between a digital scrapbook and a personal wiki. The term “garden” is supposed to be evocative of an actual, physical garden, with the attendant growing and watering and weeding that comes with it. Maggie Appleton wrote a really good article about it.

The garden metaphor is often contrasted with the stream metaphor, used to describe more traditional blogs which house timestamped, serialized content. I have one of those, too (housed on a website where you can find out more about me if you wish). More information about the distinction between these different kinds of websites can be found in the article I wrote on the subject.

In the past I maintained a wiki based on MoinMoin, which sort of filled the niche of what I’m trying to accomplish here. It was bascially a personal knowledge base. It got hacked and I eventually stopped using it, partially because I wanted a purely text based one that I could edit with Emacs.

I’ve recently started experimenting with Org Roam for this kind of stuff, even if I’m not totally sold on the finicky zettelkasten aspect of it.

Text based garden

I like the idea of maintaining this wiki/garden as I do my blog - in text, using a CM system like github to trigger publication.

Motivation

I read a fair bit, but I forget a lot of what I read. I learn a lot in my day to day life, at my job, etc. but I have a tendency to forget what I learn. One weakness I have is that my memory isn’t very good, especially when it’s adhoc knowledge.

My hope is that a digital garden can help me in this regard. Writing out a literature or permanent note for each book I read might help me rememeber what I got out of it.