Blog like gardening

Writing like gardening, concept of digital garden blog

@ Pattern

Writing is the refinement of thought

In the development field, one often finds themselves structuring information, so I feel it is fitting to refer to my daily work as a “🌵 Software Gardener🔗”:

  • Reading documents or blogs to understand how things work
  • Conveying practical ideas through writing code or documents

If you also agree that writing is for deeper thinking and hope to refine your thoughts through writing, then you should be interested in the concept of a “digital garden.”

Digital Garden

The term “digital garden” has evolved over time, and my understanding is that it serves as a metaphor for creative thinking, focusing less on the final “outcome” and more on the process required to achieve goals. This concept was popularized by Maggie Appleton🔗, who promoted the idea through multiple articles🔗.

The concept of a digital garden sounds very similar to what one might imagine; a garden is a nurturing environment where plants (ideas) can grow. It can be personal, experimental, and does not require extensive resources or high-level skills to maintain. All that is needed is to water, prune, and care for it over time. Some plants (ideas) may wither away, while others may bloom and bear fruit.

In summary, a digital garden is a tolerant and continuously nurturing environment for ideas. Here are some excellent models particularly suitable for this concept:

1. Topology over linearity

The dense connections of knowledge in a garden are essential, allowing knowledge to connect through related styles, themes, or common content, forming a topological structure rather than planning the relationships between creations linearly. For example, instead of planning content relationships based on time: recent articles, latest news, using bidirectional links🔗 is a great way to connect related knowledge, as are groups and tags.

2. Continuous growth

A digital garden is a way of learning publicly, not requiring a pile of ever-growing drafts, but rather publishing early to receive feedback sooner. Even if the ideas are still immature, continue to “cultivate” them, making adjustments over time until they may yield mature and stable viewpoints.

  • Avoid the pressure of needing to get everything right from the start, reducing writing resistance
  • Make updating ideas a daily ritual; growth will happen over time
  • Allow readers to gain insight into the writing and thinking process; we are not machines producing perfect ideas, but rather ordinary people striving to understand the world around us

3. Imperfect public learning

A digital garden publicly shares half-baked ideas and rough thoughts, imagining a blend of “social media” and “traditional blog posts,” showcasing what you know while learning to improve it. Shift the perspective on unfinished writing from “not professional enough” to “I know where I lack and am open to discussing and learning more.” Of course, this also means having the courage to share your immature thoughts and accept feedback from others.

You can label each creation with its status to inform readers. As for how to define whether a concept is mature? Maggie Appleton’s classification method uses maturity levels:

  • 🌱 Seed: Rough early ideas
  • 🌿 Sprout: Ideas that have been organized and clarified
  • 🌳 Evergreen: Relatively complete (though still cared for over time)

Of course, this is just a starting point; statuses can be defined according to personal preference. This interesting digital garden terms🔗 can help us establish a better interactive environment with readers.

🙋🏻‍♂️ Role of the visitor:

  1. Be tolerant of the garden
  2. Provide constructive suggestions
  3. Note that there is no plagiarism

🌴 Role of the gardener:

  1. Consider the readers
  2. Reveal cognition
  3. Respond to suggestions

4. Personal, fun, and experimental nature

Compared to social platforms where others can only understand your thoughts within pre-set frameworks (word count, medium, time, etc.), a digital garden should be unique and rich in personal insights. Just like different people with the same topic will have different perspectives based on their experiences, maintaining this uniqueness is very important.

5. Diversity in Creation

Blogs do not only represent text; they can also be images, videos, audio, interactions, and other forms of creation. Embracing different forms of creative expression is also a great way to embellish your garden.

6. Ownership

Most social media sites do not truly allow you to own the rights to your creative content. If a platform declines, your creative content and constructed ideas will also disappear, and the unreasonable rules and policies introduced by these platforms may also affect your creations.

Build a writing environment that you can control freely, helping you to manage your digital garden in the long term. Try to use stable and widely adopted technologies like HTML, CSS, JS, and Markdown for your creations.

Conclusion

“I appreciate well-structured, exquisitely written, and authoritative blogs, but I also have a soft spot for those that come with a humble attitude. It’s okay to just write what you know.”

Seeing the journey of my stops and starts can remind anyone that we are all thinking about how to solve problems better🔗. Creating a digital garden to construct a space for your own thoughts is something every creator should try.

Further Reading