As a fun activity, I've borrowed more terms from IRL gardening to describe digital gardening concepts. These serve not practical use - other than consistency I suppose.

Overview

The garden is composed of Plants (aka articles) that are in varying stages of growth. Every plant has has a Sign (aka metadata) that describes its time here in the garden.

The Planted date is the date the article was first added.

The Last tended date is when the article was last updated. I typically only update this date when I make a change to the content, but not when fixing broken links, correcting typos, etc.

By default both the Planted and Last tended dates show the amount of time that has passed since the respective date (e.g. "Planted 2 years ago"). You can click either of these to toggle the display to an absolute date/time (e.g. "Planted 05/11/2023 5:00 am").

Borrowing from Maggie Appleton's garden, the Status is a rough indicator of how "done" I feel an article is:

• 🌱 Seedling: A very rough and early idea. Often just a some notes.
• 🌿 Budding: Cleaned up and presentable, but still missing some intended content.
• 🌳 Evergreen: Reasonably complete, but I will still tend these over time.

Navigation

Navigation through the garden is not like a blog, and is best explained by a quote by Maggie Appleton:

"Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others. This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date."

This means there is no one entrance into the garden, and there are not a finite list of paths that you can take. However sometimes I may build a trail to guide visitors through related content, or make it easier to find articles in a more isolated region of the garden. Sort of like Andy Matuschak's index pages.

A Trail is an article that contains a hand-curated list of other articles. However unlike real trails, I encourage you to step off of them and explore on your own.

Naming

I've opted to use GUIDs for file names/urls of articles. While generally I think its best practice for websites to leverage user-friendly URLS, it doesn't quite support the constantly evolving content of a digital garden.

The main problem I want to avoid is initially naming an article something terrible (because naming things is hard) and then coming up with a better name later. With the GUID approach, the filename/URL stays the same and I'm free to update the title whenever I want.

There are a handful of early articles (like this one) that I planted prior to this decision. It seemed easy to just leave these be than setup redirects.