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 zettelkaten 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.