A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Instead of polished articles displayed in reverse chronological order like a blog, a digital garden is more like a free form, work-in-progress wiki.
Relations to Zettelkasten
There are different categories of notes in both Zettelkasten and digital gardening that can roughly translate to each other.
Digital gardening tends to be a superset of Zettelkasten ideas but more geared for public consumption rather than strictly a private endeavor.
The garden term represents the idea of notes which are constantly tended and exist in various stages of development.
I stole ideas from both, put them in the idea blender, and came up with a bag of mixed metaphors for my Zettelkasten that I really like.
Idea Journey
🍃 I use + folder as an inbox for fleeting ideas that get tagged #seed. These ideas come and go quick so it’s important to have a quick way to capture the idea. I use a voice recorder when not in front of a PC.
CTRL + Non desktop Obsidian
🌱 The next stage of an idea is germinating it to a #seedling where it graduates to the ideas folder as an individual idea. This is where thoughtgasms turn into legible, coherent, atomic ideas.
Tending to a seedling involves connecting the idea with other ideas within my knowledge base in order to gain understanding of the idea and how it fits in with what I already know. This process also involves tending to various other #evergreen notes I find along the way:
- fix a link here,
- fix some formatting there,
- reexamine if the idea still makes sense
- or if it leads me to another thought tangent
🌲 Once an idea feels more fleshed out, it graduates to #evergreen. These are the notes that I feel like are reasonably well thought-out and that I intend to keep around. But all ideas can be changed, merged, or deleted.
History is kept with git.