Ross Fenning's Digital Garden

Digital Garden

The concept of a Digital Garden is explained well by both Joel Hooks and Christian Tietze.

It is mainly a return to the idea of writing notes/posts that are evergreen, non-chronological (i.e. not a blog) and contain lots of interlinking and curation.

This is easily illustrated by looking at the idea of a Wiki (e.g. Wikipedia) where you have a single note/page per concept and you favour linking off to related concepts.

What makes this approach a garden (over, say, a stream or timeline) is that it's ok to go back and update, expand on and grow the pages over time.

I have personally felt a lot of pressure with writing a complete blog post to make it well-structured, coherent and complete before publishing.

This leads to perfectionism and Analysis Paralysis that prevents me writing at all.

I have always preferred this approach to my own blog, preferring punchy links such as /what-is-devops/ for my post on what I think DevOps is.

I've been doing this since reading Kristian Glass's 2015 article on preferring permlinks to having dates in URLs and have configured static site generators like Pelican for some time to prefer this.

However, even in my own blog post above, I still have a date in the article and the default behaviour of many static site generators is for the homepage to be a stream of content rather than an old school home page.

With the Digital Gardening approach, I plan to write more in the open and build daily habits to write more.

Tools:

Note growth model

Maggie Appleton's history of digital gardens uses the metaphors of seedlings, budding notes, and evergreens. A useful five-stage working model is:

  1. Seedling — source: capture an idea from someone else's work with clear attribution.
  2. Germination — current interpretation: record what the idea seems to mean and why it has energy now.
  3. Budding — concrete experience: add lived examples, applications, tensions, or counterexamples.
  4. Cross-pollination — connections: link it to adjacent concepts and look for a larger pattern.
  5. Evergreen — synthesis: express a more durable argument in my own terms, potentially drawing it into a full article or talk.

This is a growth model, not a mandatory content pipeline or quality ranking. Some notes can remain useful seedlings; evergreen notes remain open to revision.