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Digital Garden Design and Implementation Notes

The Technical

Spent a day evaluating ways to share my garden beyond giving people a link to the github repo (which is still on the table BTW). There's a class of software that translates markdown-html while providing indexes, styling, and everything else we expect from a "modern" personal web site. After trying out Pelican, hugo, zola, and mkDocs, I ended up with mkDocs. Which makes my brain look like an open-source project, and I guess it is.

The primary technical annoyance is that most of my note-taking and note-reading happens in the editor. So preserving folder structure and ability to follow links in-editor were both important. Pelican converts folder hierarchies into category tags. Both hugo and zola required additional work to get into deep trees. mkDocs respected folder hierarchy and gave me what I was about to create for myself with three lines of config:

site_name: My Mental Rummage Sale
site_url: https://example.com/
theme: readthedocs

Philosophical

A lot of this is converging on Tom Critchlow's ideas regarding gardens, streams, and campfires. Some of the problems with the design of social media include:

  • Unmoderated spaces tend to favor the loudest and most aggressive voices. This is an effect we've studied since the 90s.
  • Conversely, "hot takes" get more views, which in turn get more boosts.
  • Social pressure to perform on a daily or weekly basis.
  • The relationship between ephemera and creative work gets inverted. We archive ephemeral ideas for decades while more reflective work gets buried and lost.

I have a bit of bias here. I'm a recovering social media addict, so I need to be extremely careful about how and what I post online. The problem with "someone's wrong on the internet" rage is that someone is always wrong on the internet. And it's easy to get stuck fighting the same arguments online your friends and family have already agreed to disagree on. I had an anonymous blog (in hugo) for years and eventually killed it because while some ideas were good, others made me actively uncomfortable after life changed my perspective.

At the same time, I recognize the value of getting work out there, even imperfect work.

So anyway, trying out a digital garden where anything can be pruned. Most of it won't be interesting, and the piles of dirt, wheelbarrows, and paving stones are conspicuously visible. People who want more day-to-day stream-like stuff can find me on any of the smaller communities I feel comfortable engaging in.

  • first draft: 2022-11-19