Glossary Digital Garden
Digital Garden
Also known as:
garden, learning in publicProductivityWritingKnowledge Management
Definition
A personal website of notes that are published unfinished and tended over time, linked by topic rather than ordered by date
The opposite of a blog's stream: a page is never done, only more or less grown, and its value is in the links between pages. This site is one; each page's status says how far along it is.
A garden rather than a stream. A blog post is finished the day it is published and sinks down a feed from there; a garden page goes up as soon as it is useful, however rough, and gets better with each visit.
How it differs from a blog
- Unfinished on purpose. Publishing early is the point: a rough note that others can read beats a polished one that stays in a drafts folder.
- Organized by topic, not date. Pages link to one another, and the links carry as much as the pages do.
- Tended, not archived. A page is revised when its author learns more, and retired when it stops being true.
In this site
Every page carries a status that says how grown it is:
- Seed — a first idea, barely written down
- Sprout — taking shape, still changing
- Evergreen — stable and worth relying on
- Wilted — kept for the record, no longer tended; a wilted page drops off the indexes for a visitor
The garden is the published face of a second brain, filed with PARA.