Wonderful read!! As a digital gardener myself, I resonate with all your points here. There’s benefit to having a stage to write on that is not so promotional and public that it causes hesitation and filtration, but not so private like a journal that the thought is too loose and formless. Quietly public is a sweet spot for ideas to grow.
I have found digital gardening to be a very satisfying way to bridge the solitary intellectual/creative process with the feeling that I should be sharing ideas while I'm brewing bigger ready to publish pieces.
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of digital gardening for a couple years and have tried it twice (on Bear Blog then Micro.Blog) myself, but it hasn’t clicked yet. I’m fairly selective about what I share online, so even after all my reading on the topic, I’m unsure what the benefit of me having a public digital garden would be. Would I be more prone to using it if I knew others would see it? I thought so, but I find I filter way more knowing it’s “out there” for anyone to find/judge etc. Then there’s the question of — will this actually be useful to my process? I’ve loved gathering information for as long as I can remember. Collecting, compiling, organizing… it all gives me great joy! But then what?
I’m thinking out loud here. Curious if you or others can relate and how you’ve decided putting it online feels better for you vs not. :)
- I do think having my digital garden be public helps me put in more effort with writing notes and tracking my ideas. I still have private notes, so I'm filtering what I put into my public garden by topic. Anything related to creativity, philosophy, culture, psychology, language, etc. all go into my public garden. I assume no one is regularly checking out my digital garden, especially if I haven't been linking to it publicly. Withstanding judgment is a muscle to grow, and digital gardening helps me work on that regularly without blowing out my capacity to handle it.
- In terms of process—I feel like digi gardening is prob most helpful for writers and researchers, or any folks who want to trace the external sources of their work. Not sure how directly helpful it would be for visual artists, or narrative driven writing.
Digital gardening is beneficial because it trains your taste, your ability to analyze and think over things and why you like / reject them while making this process - your thinking - visible. DG builds taste and critical thinking, while leaving a visible trace of it. In an age where information is super-abundant what is scarce and has increasing value is your ability to pick, choose, organize while showing your thinking process.
This just connected the dots of my brain in a way that I’ve been trying to figure out for years! I kind of can’t wait to get to work on this right now! I’m an elder millennial, so I’m actually envisioning my old website from 2002 that I built from scratch 😂 I think you may have just changed my life 🙌
Omg I was reading this and was surprised to see a shout-out to my own post, thank you very much! <3 lovely article. I've moved away from Notion myself as well!
I tried Obsidian but it was too complex for my liking. Then I tried out capacities which i enjoyed a bit, but I wished it was more customizable. I still use it on occasion but more for long form documents. I wanted something more customizable and aesthetically pleasing for me. So I actually had claude generate a digital garden json + html that is easily editable for me, and im working on populating it. It has a lot of features i’ve always wanted for a digital garden. (A drop down tag filters+search interface, bookmarks section, randomized daily dispatches, etc) I also love how I can easily edit it using a local admin interface! (Don’t cancel me please! Haha) here it is if you’re interested in seeing it. Its mobile and desktop friendly and hosted for free on neocities. https://creativeforager.neocities.org
I love this so much. I use obsedian and scrivener for "digital gardens" although I've never called it that.. until now! There is some chaos gardening going on though.... Obsedian is more a library of organized info (mostly astrology, tarot, other symbollic systems) and scrivener is more for organizing ideas/research for writing topics (and hopefully will be used more for actual writing once I get my proverbial ducks in a row).
But I'm really interested in your digital garden, that looks like it is through Quartz5? I've never heard of that. I really would love to have an online library that people can reference for astrology and tarot, iching hexagrams, etc. I tried making one on my website, but it doesn't work well, and a blog isn't a great platform for a reference library. basically what I envision is a cleaner, better linked Obsedian, but something that other people have access to on the web. Does this sound like a good use of Quartz5? Any advice on how to set one up? Looks like I would need some kind of coding knowledge? Thank you!
Hi, thanks so much! Chaos gardening is so real. I've got a separate Scrivener too and it's mostly a dump of research and quotes apart from the writing draft at the moment. But I don't think all our systems have to be organized, just organized enough to move forward!
I’m really enjoying reading your Quietly Public series and I’m excited about your upcoming interview with Kening. That’s where I first learned about digital gardening and I’ve been curious about it ever since.
I love exploring digital gardens. I wouldn't call my website a digital garden (yet??) because it's still largely date driven. Lately I've been using it to document beekeeping observations, and dates are useful for those. But I'm curious about figuring out a way to implement a more gardeny style to that Wordpress site, or perhaps exploring a different platform altogether for a more meandering/gardenish presentation.
Loving this series, and it's gotten me back into Obsidian. I love the idea of bringing in outside thoughts, really using this as a *thinking* tool that grows organically instead of a structure to build and shape rigidly. Obsidian's graph view is awesome for finding outlying thoughts or seeing how many ideas tie back to the same place.
How much effort do you put into linking? I have a tendency not to like "floating" nodes and want to link them back to something. 😅 Also, does Quartz let you convert the graph view to a web page, too?
I respect your efforts in linking all your notes! I usually make connections to past things I've read/wrote when I first write my notes, and don't really take time to link otherwise.. but I respect the effort and think the linking can lead to such rich material!
I have been trying to have a shared space for my musings for years now. They are strewn across WhatsApp groups with myself, Google Docs, Keep Notes, and notebooks long lost :(
I tried Obsidian but don't like that I can't add stuff using my phone, because I need to be able to write on the go. I think taking out time to add every week or month is not very conducive to my style of creating :(
With Notion and Sublime, I have been trying to understand and use them, but I can't say I know how to use them. Am I the only one struggling with trying to navigate and use them?
Wonderful read!! As a digital gardener myself, I resonate with all your points here. There’s benefit to having a stage to write on that is not so promotional and public that it causes hesitation and filtration, but not so private like a journal that the thought is too loose and formless. Quietly public is a sweet spot for ideas to grow.
Exactly, it hits that sweet spot!
I have found digital gardening to be a very satisfying way to bridge the solitary intellectual/creative process with the feeling that I should be sharing ideas while I'm brewing bigger ready to publish pieces.
I’m really enjoying this series, Carolyn!
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of digital gardening for a couple years and have tried it twice (on Bear Blog then Micro.Blog) myself, but it hasn’t clicked yet. I’m fairly selective about what I share online, so even after all my reading on the topic, I’m unsure what the benefit of me having a public digital garden would be. Would I be more prone to using it if I knew others would see it? I thought so, but I find I filter way more knowing it’s “out there” for anyone to find/judge etc. Then there’s the question of — will this actually be useful to my process? I’ve loved gathering information for as long as I can remember. Collecting, compiling, organizing… it all gives me great joy! But then what?
I’m thinking out loud here. Curious if you or others can relate and how you’ve decided putting it online feels better for you vs not. :)
Hi Erika! Great questions :)
- I do think having my digital garden be public helps me put in more effort with writing notes and tracking my ideas. I still have private notes, so I'm filtering what I put into my public garden by topic. Anything related to creativity, philosophy, culture, psychology, language, etc. all go into my public garden. I assume no one is regularly checking out my digital garden, especially if I haven't been linking to it publicly. Withstanding judgment is a muscle to grow, and digital gardening helps me work on that regularly without blowing out my capacity to handle it.
- In terms of process—I feel like digi gardening is prob most helpful for writers and researchers, or any folks who want to trace the external sources of their work. Not sure how directly helpful it would be for visual artists, or narrative driven writing.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share further!! I appreciate how you approach these tools and practices with such intention.
Digital gardening is beneficial because it trains your taste, your ability to analyze and think over things and why you like / reject them while making this process - your thinking - visible. DG builds taste and critical thinking, while leaving a visible trace of it. In an age where information is super-abundant what is scarce and has increasing value is your ability to pick, choose, organize while showing your thinking process.
This just connected the dots of my brain in a way that I’ve been trying to figure out for years! I kind of can’t wait to get to work on this right now! I’m an elder millennial, so I’m actually envisioning my old website from 2002 that I built from scratch 😂 I think you may have just changed my life 🙌
Happy to facilitate web inspiration Christine! We direly need it :)
Don’t forget to let it gestate!!!
Caroly, thank you for writing this and sharing. Inspiring!
such a resourceful post that entrusts confidence in these ventures! yay i'm so excited to dive in <3
Well I’m instantly obsessed with this
Omg I was reading this and was surprised to see a shout-out to my own post, thank you very much! <3 lovely article. I've moved away from Notion myself as well!
Hi Harley! Oooh what’s your setup now?
I tried Obsidian but it was too complex for my liking. Then I tried out capacities which i enjoyed a bit, but I wished it was more customizable. I still use it on occasion but more for long form documents. I wanted something more customizable and aesthetically pleasing for me. So I actually had claude generate a digital garden json + html that is easily editable for me, and im working on populating it. It has a lot of features i’ve always wanted for a digital garden. (A drop down tag filters+search interface, bookmarks section, randomized daily dispatches, etc) I also love how I can easily edit it using a local admin interface! (Don’t cancel me please! Haha) here it is if you’re interested in seeing it. Its mobile and desktop friendly and hosted for free on neocities. https://creativeforager.neocities.org
I love this so much. I use obsedian and scrivener for "digital gardens" although I've never called it that.. until now! There is some chaos gardening going on though.... Obsedian is more a library of organized info (mostly astrology, tarot, other symbollic systems) and scrivener is more for organizing ideas/research for writing topics (and hopefully will be used more for actual writing once I get my proverbial ducks in a row).
But I'm really interested in your digital garden, that looks like it is through Quartz5? I've never heard of that. I really would love to have an online library that people can reference for astrology and tarot, iching hexagrams, etc. I tried making one on my website, but it doesn't work well, and a blog isn't a great platform for a reference library. basically what I envision is a cleaner, better linked Obsedian, but something that other people have access to on the web. Does this sound like a good use of Quartz5? Any advice on how to set one up? Looks like I would need some kind of coding knowledge? Thank you!
Hi, thanks so much! Chaos gardening is so real. I've got a separate Scrivener too and it's mostly a dump of research and quotes apart from the writing draft at the moment. But I don't think all our systems have to be organized, just organized enough to move forward!
I fully use Obsidian for my digital garden. It is made public facing on the web through Quartz 5, which generates the static site that you see online. You can follow the setup steps here, which I fully acknowledge may be overwhelming for coding newbies! https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/getting-started/ and this post might help with the prerequisites https://medium.com/@heera_jat/mastering-the-essentials-installing-npm-node-js-git-for-beginners-c3e13d7bef33
Ohhh ty so much for this! Very helpful. Can’t wait to dive into this new little project 🥰
I’m really enjoying reading your Quietly Public series and I’m excited about your upcoming interview with Kening. That’s where I first learned about digital gardening and I’ve been curious about it ever since.
Thank you Melanie! Kening is such a beacon of inspiration. Can't wait to share the interview!
I love exploring digital gardens. I wouldn't call my website a digital garden (yet??) because it's still largely date driven. Lately I've been using it to document beekeeping observations, and dates are useful for those. But I'm curious about figuring out a way to implement a more gardeny style to that Wordpress site, or perhaps exploring a different platform altogether for a more meandering/gardenish presentation.
Hi Lisa! That's a really exciting exploration :) I encourage you to dream freely in your structure then see what tool could help you realize it!
Loving this series, and it's gotten me back into Obsidian. I love the idea of bringing in outside thoughts, really using this as a *thinking* tool that grows organically instead of a structure to build and shape rigidly. Obsidian's graph view is awesome for finding outlying thoughts or seeing how many ideas tie back to the same place.
How much effort do you put into linking? I have a tendency not to like "floating" nodes and want to link them back to something. 😅 Also, does Quartz let you convert the graph view to a web page, too?
Thanks again for all this great info! ✨
Thanks Joshua! Quartz does seem to have a graph view as a separate plugin https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/graph-view
I respect your efforts in linking all your notes! I usually make connections to past things I've read/wrote when I first write my notes, and don't really take time to link otherwise.. but I respect the effort and think the linking can lead to such rich material!
Awesome, thanks!
It’s an interesting idea, but I still don’t know how it could benefit for me. I’m glad that this process helps you.
Love this idea! Thanks for sharing!
Aha! Ive just been struggling to figure out the best structure & tools for this exact thing. Thank you for generously sharing your shortcut.
I have been trying to have a shared space for my musings for years now. They are strewn across WhatsApp groups with myself, Google Docs, Keep Notes, and notebooks long lost :(
I tried Obsidian but don't like that I can't add stuff using my phone, because I need to be able to write on the go. I think taking out time to add every week or month is not very conducive to my style of creating :(
With Notion and Sublime, I have been trying to understand and use them, but I can't say I know how to use them. Am I the only one struggling with trying to navigate and use them?