Digital gardening

<p>I spotted this post by Chris Armstrong on <a href="https://armstrong.is/miscellaneous/digital-gardening">Digital Gardening</a> the other day and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Chris imagines a personal website being so much more than a humble blog with a series of chronological posts:</p> <blockquote> <p>A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. It also creates a pressure to publish something—anything—whether you have anything worth saying or not. It prioritises novelty over quality.</p> </blockquote> <p>How many bangers on this here website are lost to the feed of new stuff and are only hard to find because of the chronological list I’ve slapped together? There’s so much stuff that I’d like to revise or tweak or scratch out—but keep a record of that change of mind for the future. Wouldn’t that be so neat? Going back over twenty years of work and watching your thought process adapt over time?</p> <p>Anyway, I especially like this bit where Chris argues that personal websites could become more like wikis instead:</p> <blockquote> <p>With digital gardens, every new piece of content in the network has the potential to add depth and context to every other part. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.</p> </blockquote> <p>I truly love the idea that topics might grow over time with constant refininement. Expand! Condense! Connect! Threads that weave through other threads and aren’t just sticky notes like this website here, but instead a personal hive mind, a more permanent—and perhaps useful!—stack.</p> <p>I’ll be honest: this gives me the itch to redesign the structure of content on my website and go back through old posts and tag them all, organize them better for future reference. I know I’ve literally just shipped a new version of this website but hey endlessly redesigning this place is like my whole deal huh.</p>