πŸ“œ Contributions by @agora@botsin.space at [[garden]]
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πŸ“œ File garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž β›Ά

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πŸ“š Agora node [[a brief history & ethos of the digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.md by @binnyva β˜† πŸ“Ž

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital GardenΒ§

Source

They’re collections of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organized by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time.

It’s a different way of thinking about our online behavior around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explore-able space.

FeaturesΒ§

  1. Topography over Timelines: Organized by contextual relationships, bi-directional links.
  2. Continuous Growth: Continuously evolving work in progress.
  3. Learning in Public & Imperfection: Blogging is performative. Digital gardening is less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time. ![https://res.cloudinary.com/dg3gyk0gu/image/upload/c_scale,w_1600/v1593765637/maggieappleton.com/notes/garden-history/digital-garden.png]
  4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental: Even the tools are evolving and experimental.
  5. Inter-cropping & Content Diversity: All varieties of mediums grow in the garden - videos, podcasts, short notes, long essays, academic papers, sketches.
  6. Independent Ownership: No one can take your garden away. If you give it a bit of forethought – storing notes in flat markdown files – you can built it in a way that easily transfers as platforms and technologies inevitably change.

Original Source - Talk, Article


TagsΒ§

#digital-garden #zettelkasten

πŸ“š Agora node [[a brief history ethos of the digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File a-brief-history-ethos-of-the-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital GardenΒ§

URL : https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Author : [[Maggie Appleton]]

The Six Patterns of GardeningΒ§

  1. Topography over timelines
  2. Continuous growth
  3. Imperfection & learning in public
  4. Playful, personal and experimental
  5. Intercropping & content diversity
  6. Independent ownership
πŸ“š Agora node [[a half built garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File a-half-built-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

A Half-Built GardenΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[a walk in the garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File gemini/A Walk in the Garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

A Walk in the GardenΒ§

Welcome to the [[Agora of Flancia]]. If you are new here, the graph can be overwhelming. This path is a suggested narrative "walk" through the garden to help you get oriented.

The PathΒ§

1. The Gardener: [[flancian]]Β§

Start here to meet the person tending this plot. Understanding the gardener’s background (Google SRE, Argentine, Optimist) helps frame the rest of the content.

2. The Project: [[agora]]Β§

What is this place? It’s not just a website; it’s a Distributed Knowledge Graph. Read this to understand the "What".

3. The Philosophy: [[protopia]]Β§

Why are we doing this? We aren’t building Utopia (which is impossible). We are building Protopia (incremental improvement). This is the "Why".

  • See also: [[moloch]] (the enemy we are fighting).

4. The Methods: [[digital gardening]]Β§

How do we work? We don’t write "posts"; we tend "notes". We value work-in-progress, links, and constant revision.

5. The Community: [[goblin odds]]Β§

Say hello to a friend. The Agora is populated by real people. This node represents the social graphβ€”the "Who".

Where to go next?Β§

Now that you’ve walked the main path, feel free to get lost.

  • Click [[Random]] to jump somewhere unexpected.
  • Check [[latest]] to see what’s growing right now.
πŸ“š Agora node [[active recall and passive repetition in the digital stream and garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File active-recall-and-passive-repetition-in-the-digital-stream-and-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Active recall and passive repetition in the digital stream and gardenΒ§

[[Passive repetition]] can result in an [[illusion of knowing]]. Better to do [[active repetition]] when you can.

One of the key uses of a digital stream and digital garden for me is as a personal educational tool - helping me to learn. One way they can help with this is by encouraging active recall and repetition. Writing in a digital garden or on social media can be a form of active repetition.

Not by default, though - you can quite easily also do passive repetition in a digital garden. Just copying and pasting text from elsewhere would be largely passive repetition. Similar to just underlining or highlighting.

I think the journal pages of a digital garden is a good space for active repetition. Somewhere to summarise ideas in your own words, and for "blurting".

I suppose you can do active recall in both the stream and the garden. But the stream is your working area for it, and the garden where you store what sticks long term.

Traditional social media / microblogging is also great for this. Particularly as dialogue and group discussion is an excellent prompt for active recall. However for me they also have a huge problem - distraction. I can’t go on the Fediverse without it ending up as a bit of a mindless scroll fest. (Which, admittedly of often a useful tool for information discovery…)

πŸ“š Agora node [[adding a new connections page to my garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File adding-a-new-connections-page-to-my-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Adding a new connections page to my gardenΒ§

I wonder if I can just rehash most of the stuff from the [[Well-connected]] page.

Kind of - the links table of org-roam.db has neither a timestamp nor an id column. Can make use of sqlite’s rowid field, but that’s not particularly reliable. Hmm.

Thinking about it, not really possible. Or not simple at least. It would require amending org-roam internals to allow for link annotations.

See chat at https://org-roam.discourse.group/t/recording-the-date-that-connections-were-made/3379

πŸ“š Agora node [[adding planted and last tended dates to pages in my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File adding-planted-and-last-tended-dates-to-pages-in-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Adding planted and last tended dates to pages in my digital gardenΒ§

WhyΒ§

It’s a nice practice to display the date that a page was created, and, more importantly, last modified, in your digital garden. It gives the reader a clue as to the status of the information contained in the page.

HowΒ§

I already have ‘This page last updated: …’ at the very bottom of every page.

But I’d prefer it right at the top. And I’d also like to indicate when the page was created, too. I don’t want it to be be too prominent/distracting, but at the same time I have some pretty old pages knocking around now and I’d like people to be aware that they might be outdated.

It’ll be a matter of (a) pulling the times out from somewhere; and (b) being able to render them.

Pulling times outΒ§

I’m currently using the date value for modified time that you get when you use the :with-date flag in org-publish. But it doesn’t provide creation time.

I have ctimes and mtimes on all files(?), courtesy of the [[org-roam-timestamps]] package. So in theory I can use those. They are file-level properties name ctime and mtime. As far as I can tell, they don’t exist in the info plist that’s passed around during the export process.

So, for now, I’ve cobbled together a way to pull them out from the buffer using org-property-values.

(let* ((ctime-property (car (org-property-values "ctime")))
       (mtime-property (car (org-property-values "mtime")))
       (ctime-date (if ctime-property
                       (car (split-string ctime-property))
                     nil))
       (mtime-date (if mtime-property
                       (car (split-string mtime-property))
                     nil))
       )

Rendering themΒ§

So the rendering is going to be in my override of org-html-template (of which I have a note to self saying that I shouldn’t really be overriding it…)

As a simple example:

(defun commonplace/format-date (date-str)
  (let ((year (substring date-str 0 4))
        (month (substring date-str 4 6))
        (day (substring date-str 6 8)))
    (format "%s/%s/%s" day month year)))

(defun commonplace/org-html-template (contents info)
  (let* ((ctime-property (car (org-property-values "ctime")))
         (mtime-property (car (org-property-values "mtime")))
         (ctime-date (if ctime-property
                         (car (split-string ctime-property))
                       nil))
         (mtime-date (if mtime-property
                         (car (split-string mtime-property))
                       nil))
         )
    (concat ""
            (if ctime-date (concat "ctime: " (commonplace/format-date ctime-date)))
            " "
            (if mtime-date (concat "mtime: " (commonplace/format-date mtime-date)))
            "")))

Check out my publish.el for the real function that I’m using.

πŸ“š Agora node [[agora digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File agora-digital-garden.md by @patterning β˜† πŸ“Ž

Open Mind

πŸ“œ File stoa-test-2/agora-digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž

Open Mind

πŸ“œ File stoa-test/agora-digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž

Open Mind

πŸ“œ File agora-digital-garden.md by @anonymous@doc.anagora.org β˜† πŸ“Ž ✍️

Open Mind

πŸ“š Agora node [[bamboo garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File bamboo garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[cleaning the garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File pages/cleaning the garden.org by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž

going through your digital gardenand cleaning out the cruft that's accumulated over the years

πŸ“š Agora node [[cluster garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File gemini/cluster_garden.py by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

(Python code, output might appear as a push if this Agora supports it.)

πŸ“š Agora node [[data garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File data-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Data GardenΒ§

URL : https://cyrus.website/data-garden

By storing data nature’s way, in the DNA of plants, this work discusses the potential for truly green, carbon absorbing data storage, owned by the public rather than monopolistic corporations.

Art project, not necessarily reality anytime soon, but I love this as an idea and a provocation.

[[Solarpunk]].

πŸ“š Agora node [[digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž

Digital GardenΒ§

A digital garden is a personal website or knowledge base that grows slowly over time. Unlike a blog, which is chronologically sorted and "finished", a garden is:

  • Evergreen: Content is constantly updated and refined.
  • Interconnected: Notes are linked together heavily (using [[wikilinks]]), creating a web of thought rather than a stream.
  • Personal: It reflects the gardener’s unique way of thinking and organizing the world.
  • Imperfect: It welcomes rough notes, drafts, and "seeds" of ideas.

Why keep a garden?Β§

  • To learn in public: Share your notes as you learn, helping others and getting feedback.
  • To think better: Writing connects ideas.
  • To own your data: A garden is usually a set of simple text files you control, not locked in a platform.

In the AgoraΒ§

In this [[Agora]], digital gardens are the primary source of knowledge.

  • Each [[node]] (like this one) is a topic or Agora location.
  • Each [[subnode]] is a post from a specific user’s garden about that topic.

When you [[join]] the Agora, your garden becomes part of this shared knowledge commons.

ReferencesΒ§

πŸ“œ File digital garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“œ File pages/digital-garden.md by @j0lms β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File digital_garden.myco by @melanocarpa β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Digital garden is a metaphor and a practice for a digital resource such as a website, usually managed (β€œgrown”) by one person. Its content is usually placed not chronologically, but in a different way. Incompleteness of content units such as articles is pretty common. An unfinished article is a sapling, and the webmaster is a gardener.

A digital garden is a sort of a personal website.

See Ρ†ΠΈΡ„Ρ€ΠΎΠ²ΠΎΠΉ сад for more information in Russian.

Some gardens and personal wikis:

See the rest of personal sites, some of them being digital gardens, at Invalid interwiki: interwiki not set up .

Agora aggregates digital gardens.

What to keep? 2022-07-22

Maybe I should delete everything related to things I dislike from my digital garden? Make it a bouncespace with smiles and joy

@neauoire@merveilles.town

I don't think you should delete things that you once liked, and no longer do, I think you should just write that you're ideas about this thing changed instead.

Abyss

J3s has an interesting take:

to me, it feels wrong. i don't write for meticulous care & growth, i write because i'm desperate to (connect, understand, remember, leave something behind)

it reminds me that i'll die someday & i want people to remember who i was, and how i thought. i leave tracings of myself in this abyss, hoping that it'll help other people. it's fragments of me.

that's no garden. it's a mortal abyss. and i find a lot of meaning staring into it.

Heh nice the digital garden metaphor makes an appearance in Free, Fair and Alive

Cannot transclude hypha Flux Garden because it does not exist

πŸ“œ File digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Digital gardenΒ§

Recently-ish popular term for a kind of public personal PKM / wiki. [[A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden]] is a great read to learn more about digital gardens.

Also see [[the Garden]] metaphor for some history.

WhatΒ§

an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public.

– How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs

  • a concept that describes the practice of maintaining and growing a collection of digital content, such as notes, ideas, and thoughts, in an organic and unstructured way.
  • often used as a creative tool for exploring, sharing, and developing ideas, and can be viewed as a more flexible and fluid alternative to traditional personal blogs or portfolios.
  • a way to document learning and growth over time, and a way to share thoughts and experiences with others.

You mean a wiki, right?Β§

I think "wiki" is a term that focuses on a particular tool, whereas "digital garden" is a more user-intention high level phrase

– https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2021-11-26#t1637964070215800

You mean blogging, right?Β§

Sounds a bit like blogging, no?

I prefer to think of digital gardening as a new variation of blogging. Blogging that is:

  • Constantly evolving
  • Less performative
  • Community-focused

– πŸͺ΄ Planting Your Digital Garden

Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.

– How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs

You mean personal websites, right?Β§

I tend to think of it more as that intersection of notebook/blog/wiki, but it is sometimes also framed as ‘old school [[personal website]]‘.

A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblrβ€”less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.

– Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. – Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

WhyΒ§

β€œWith [[blogging]], you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. β€œWith digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

– Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.

– Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

β€œGardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. β€œThe garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.”

– Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Why notΒ§

Should you really publish your half-baked notes-to-self to the Internet?

To me that is unthinkable: my notes are an extension of my thinking and a personal tool. They are part of my inner space. Publishing is a very different thing, meant for a different audience (you, not me), more product than internal process. At most I can imagine having separate public versions of internal notes, but really anything I publish in a public digital garden is an output of my internal digital garden.

– 100 Days in Obsidian Pt 6: Final Observations – Interdependent Thoughts

To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes.

– hpfr

You’re probably already doing itΒ§

Believe it or not, you’ve probably already started planting the seeds of your digital garden. You don’t necessarily need an organized wiki on your self-hosted personal site. Posting on social media is still the most common form of digital gardening.

– πŸͺ΄ Planting Your Digital Garden

Agree with that wholeheartedly. Although the [[indiewebber]] in me says that if you’re doing it on a big social media platform, it won’t work out in the long run.

MiscΒ§

  • The garden is more about the [[use-value]] of information, the stream more about [[exchange-value]] of information.

Twin PagesΒ§

πŸ“œ File digital-garden.md by @patterning β˜† πŸ“Ž

Rationality Stuff This is

h1Β§

index content,(^Β§

πŸ“œ File pages/digital garden.md by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž
  • Seeds. Seed your garden with quality content and cultivate your curiosity. Plant seeds in your mind garden by taking smart personal notes (taking raw notes is useless). These don’t need to be written in a publishable form.

  • Trees. Grow your knowledge by forming new branches and connecting the dots. Write short structured notes articulating specific ideas and publish them in your digital garden. One note in your digital garden = one idea. (what you’re currently reading is such a note) Do not keep orphan notes. Thread your thoughts.

  • Fruits. Produce new work. These are more substantialβ€”essays, videos, maybe a book at some point. The kind of work researchers and creatives may hope will help them live beyond their expiration date.

    [[Maggie Appleton Garden]]

πŸ“œ File content/pages/digital garden.md by @wilde-at-heart β˜† πŸ“Ž

What is a digital garden?Β§

To quote Maggie Appleton’s "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden",

They’re not following the conventions of the "personal blog," as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

A digital garden allows me to find connections between my thoughts and the things I’m interested in. I tend to my garden when I can. I can also see how my ideas grow over time. Because I make it public, you can witness all this. This is called [[learning in public]].

Stages of growthΒ§

It is important to note that, during the growth process, all notes remain atomic.

  • 🌱 seedling notes aren’t quite the very start of an idea, but the note has enough in it that I can link it to other things and have it make sense to people who aren’t me (otherwise I wouldn’t make it public)

  • 🌿 budding notes are cleaned up and have gone through a bit of distillation; maybe I’ve linked more things to them

  • 🌳 evergreen notes are at a stage when I can move them into my πŸ—ƒ [Zettelkasten]({{< ref "Zettelkasten" >}}); they are mature enough to serve as building blocks for things I might write or otherwise express.


Digital garden terms of serviceΒ§

Because a digital garden exposes my ideas to the world, it puts me in a vulnerable position. Therefore, I ask that you follow the Digital Garden Terms of Service, and I promise to do the same.

πŸ“œ File stoa-test-2/digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž

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πŸ“œ File stoa-test/digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž

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πŸ“œ File digital-garden.md by @anonymous@doc.anagora.org β˜† πŸ“Ž ✍️

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πŸ“œ File digital garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File digital garden.md by @an_agora@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File Digital Garden.md by @an_agora@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File digital garden.md by @anagora@matrix.org β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File Digital-Garden.md by @anagora@matrix.org β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File digital garden.md by @flancian@social.coop β˜† πŸ“Ž
  • [[2023-02-03 22:13:36+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] https://social.coop/@flancian/109803104954352492:
    • I’m running many hundreds of tabs overall at any time.

      My [[digital garden]], which holds many of my memories and mental contexts, has more than more than 6k nodes. About 1000 probably have some associated task.

      The [[Agora]], which maybe holds my collective brain, knows of 25k nodes and 125k links currently and might have a million by the end of 2023.

  • [[2024-09-28 17:33:57+00:00]] @[[flancian@social.coop]] (link):
    • @edumerco depende del wiki por ahora, pero la idea del Γ‘gora es exactamente que es una composiciΓ³n pro-social de wikis podrΓ­a decirse :)

      un [[digital garden]] es lo mΓ‘s soportado por ahora, tipo mantenido con [[obsidian]] o [[org mode]]. un repositorio de git con markdown es la “lingua franca”

πŸ“š Agora node [[digitalgarden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File digitalGarden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File DigitalGarden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File DigitalGarden.md by @an_agora@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[flancian garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File flancian garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[flux garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File flux_garden.myco by @melanocarpa β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

FluxGarden is a proprietary tool for maintaining a digital garden developed and sold by Bill Seitz.

You get 2 gardens: 1 private ("inner") and 1 public ("outer"). (Under the same subdomain which you pick, like "alice.flux.garden".) Both spaces give you:

  • the same Markdown format, and double-bracket linking for Backlinks;

  • a nice front-page of most-recently-updated pages, with excerpt;

  • an RSS (Atom) feed.

The software looks great, but requires a subscription:

  • $99/year

  • $15/month

I'm not sure if it has an export function. If it does, I can say you can safely use it. Bill Seitz looks like a chill guy, but you know how it is with commercial centralized services. They all break eventually.

πŸ“œ File flux garden.md by @an_agora@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File flux garden.md by @flancian@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
  • [[flancian]] https://twitter.com/{‘id’: ‘773144670507499521’, ‘name’: ‘The Agora is a Federated Knowledge Commons’, ‘username’: ‘flancian’}/status/1552418258829164545
    • @BillSeitz @an_agora @WardCunningham @csageland @bmann @jessmartin @RobertHaisfield @balOShere @JoelChan86 @TiddlyWiki @socialroots_io @Bortseb @kvistgaard @mathewlowry RSS makes sense to me!

Does [[flux garden]] publishes all resources somewhere?

An Agora publishes updates at https://t.co/tIA5ldzHT9

πŸ“š Agora node [[fluxgarden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File fluxgarden.md by @an_agora@twitter.com β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[gitea garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File gitea-garden.md by @anagora@matrix.org β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[gitpod garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File gitpod garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[hosted garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File hosted garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File hosted garden.md by @flancian@social.coop β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[inner garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File inner-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Inner gardenΒ§

Like Bill Seitz describes here - http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TendingYourInnerAndOuterDigitalGardens - I have a completely private ‘inner garden’ that is for personal stuff. It never gets published to my public digital garden.

It’s really more of a personal todo system, not so much a garden. But I do use org-roam for parts of it.

πŸ“œ File inner garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[japanese garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File japanese garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“œ File japanese garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[maggie appleton garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File Maggie Appleton Garden.md by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž

[[Maggie Appleton]]

#go https://maggieappleton.com/garden

  • An open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I’m currently cultivating. Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen.
  • [[digital garden history]]
  • Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog. It’s less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than our [[twitter]] feed.
πŸ“š Agora node [[mediterranean garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File mediterranean garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

#go https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/mediterraneanGardenSoundscapeGenerator.php

πŸ“š Agora node [[mind garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File mind-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

mind gardenΒ§

In French, "cultiver son jardin intΓ©rieur" means to tend to your internal gardenβ€”to take care of your mind.

Essentially about [[personal knowledge management]]. Heard about it from [[Anne-Laure]] (did she also come up with the term?). Commonly manifested in a [[digital garden]].

taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits).

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

I like this alternative way of thinking about [[seek, sense, share]].

each day tending to your β€œmind garden” is different: discovering a new learning strategy, having a eureka moment, connecting the dots between two authors, getting involved in a lively conversation with an expert

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

When consuming content, grow branches on your knowledge tree by taking notes.

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

Over time, you will find yourself going back to certain corners of your mind garden more often than others, and that’s alright.

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

You will see parts of your interests form and coalesce.

When you find some of these new combinations particularly interesting, share the seeds with fellow gardeners. Leverage the knowledge of fellow explorers.

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

[[Network learning]].

Your [[note-taking app]], such as Roam or one of its open source alternatives for instance, can be used for collating snippets, ideas, and raw thinking. Use it to seed your garden and connect the dots.

– You and your mind garden - Ness Labs

πŸ“š Agora node [[my garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File images/my-garden.png by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️


πŸ“š Agora node [[neil s digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File neil-s-digital-garden.md by @patterning β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File stoa-test-2/neil-s-digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File stoa-test/neil-s-digital-garden.md by @agora β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File neil-s-digital-garden.md by @anonymous@doc.anagora.org β˜† πŸ“Ž ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[neils digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File neils-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Neil’s Digital GardenΒ§

[[Hello]]Β§

Welcome! You have landed upon my [[hyper commonplace garden wiki]] AKA [[digital garden]].

It is someplace between a notebook and a blog and a wiki.

β₯… [[2020-03-19_23-27-44_iScape.png]]

You are most welcome here. It is something of a [[maze]] of technology, politics, nature and culture. I hope you find something that you like!

Start hereΒ§

As of Monday, November 9, 2026 , there are 7158 places to explore in my garden.

If you’d like to look around, here are some of the more well-tended pathways on which to get started:

You might also chance your luck in these more overgrown trails:

Please feel free to click around here and explore. Don’t expect too much in the way coherence or permanence… it is a lot of half-baked ideas, badly organised. The very purpose is for snippets to percolate and morph and evolve over time, and it’s possible (quite likely) that pages will move around.

That said, I make it public in the interest of info-sharing, and occassionally it is quite useful to have a public place to refer someone to an idea-in-progress of mine.

Here’s a graphical representation of the notes and connections in my garden. It doesn’t mean a whole lot, but it looks nice.

β₯… [[images/my-garden.png]]

Some more info on the [[whats and the whys]].

πŸ“š Agora node [[nocturnal garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File nocturnal garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[options for publishing an org roam based digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File options-for-publishing-an-org-roam-based-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

options for publishing an org-roam-based digital gardenΒ§

My org-publish build ([[How I publish my wiki with org-publish]]) is so horrendously slow that I always have an eye out for alternatives. I like the idea of using something native to Emacs, but it’s just ridiculously slow to build my static site. It’s 6000 odd org files but it still shouldn’t be so slow.

Alternatively I’d dig in to how org-publish works and see if I can speed it up. I’ve tried that a little before though and didn’t get very far ([[Speeding up org-export and org-publish]]).

InvestigationsΒ§

firnΒ§

[[using firn for publishing my org-roam digital garden]].

Conclusion: doesn’t like id: links. Not gonna happen.

hugoΒ§

[[using ox-hugo for publishing my org-roam digital garden]].

Conclusion: Seems to prefer one post per org subtree rather than per file. Not going any further with it for now. But others are using it successfully, so check in to it again in future.

weblorgΒ§

Looks promising. Seen in the wild here:

emanoteΒ§

https://emanote.srid.ca/demo/orgmode

org-roam-uiΒ§

Some discussion around letting you publish it for the web here: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-ui/discussions/109

Seems to have been achieved: https://ikoamu.github.io/publish-org-roam-ui/

DiscussionΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[plantey's digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File Plantey's Digital Garden.md by @plantey β˜† πŸ“Ž

—->This is a fuzzy, public note. I plan to clarify it next time I see it…

  • Learn more about this before writing on it…

This is my [Digital Garden].

Digital GardenΒ§

In general, a digital garden is an online places that show your developing thoughts.

A blog is where people post finished, polished posts; a digital garden is more of a work-in-progress for writing.

If you search much online, you’ll find different kinds of gardens

A Garden with a GreenhouseΒ§

I’m not a huge fan of publicly saying something about a topic before I’ve learned much about it, so I’m using Obsidian as an incubator for my ideas until I clarify them enough to share them.2

A lot of digital gardens have some really cool stuff, once you peruse through them. At the same time, it gets hard to find the cool and clear bits when a lot of it feels like blog posts that are clear and insightful…until you get halfway through and find that it (Or what feels like the first half of an article.) The whole process is out in the open.

Personally, I prefer to keep all my raw thinking in Obsidian so I can cultivate it before I set it out before the public eye to be interacted with by others. (I’ve found that ideas can get a bit shy or unhelpful when I don’t clarify them before I share them. They’ve got to grow up a bit first before they can dialogue with others well.)

In other words, my public digital garden is mostly made up of crops that have grown a bit, whereas my personal notes are more of a Greenhouse for ideas.

In my use3, this digital garden is an online place to hold my ideas in a way.

What my working goal for this… is is to distinguish between

  • asdf
    • but maybe show working titles and backlinks for users to click on to see how many would be interested in this or that a note (could help me structure my priorities)
      • I’d need a "this was…" thing above each, btw

A Garden for Ideas; A Garage for ProjectsΒ§

To clarify: the projects I’m working on in public aren’t part of my garden. Instead, they’re different enough that I prefer to call them my [[Digital Garage]]1.

A good amount of current projects in the garage are indeed things that I want to use in order to build my garden up, but that might have to wait for now. I have a few invention ideas in a separate list, but seeing that those are ideas and not current things I’m aiming to make, I’ll wait until I have something more like an evergreen note in order to


metadata

1: Note: In my note-taking app, I use [[wikilinks]] (which are links between notes that have double brackets) to connect ideas together. A lot of capital These won’t be clickable on this site for now. (Though I do need to set that up…)

2: This happens on the level of individual ideas. I definitely don’t want to wait until I master a whole topic before writing on it, but this helps put a balance between sharing where I am in my understanding and developing it on my own.

3: Because I think my usage of this idea is different enough from the common use of it, I might name a new term. This is just my current analogy for now. Subject to change, of course. I just want to distinguish from the common use.

πŸ“š Agora node [[plotting the growth of my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File plotting-the-growth-of-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Plotting the growth of my digital gardenΒ§

β₯… [[2022-02-05_14-36-11_screenshot.png]]

March 2020 was when I started using org-roam.

This post has a handy script for pulling out a count of the files in your git repo over time: {Git} Graph file count vs time | Good Code Smell

#!/bin/bash

OUTPUT=stats.csv

# create output file with a CSV header
echo "date,files" > $OUTPUT

# function that counts files matching the specified regex
count() {
    git ls-tree -r --name-only $COMMIT | grep -e $1 | wc -l | sed 's/ //g'
}

# for each commit in log
git log --pretty="%H %cd" --date=short | while read COMMIT DATE
do
    # skip commits made on the same day
    [ "$PREV_DATE" == "$DATE" ] && continue
    PREV_DATE="$DATE"

    # count files
    FILES=$(count ".*\.org$")

    # print to console
    echo $DATE
    echo " $FILES	.org files"

    # append to CSV file
    echo "$DATE,$FILES" >> $OUTPUT 
done
πŸ“š Agora node [[questions about my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File questions-about-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Questions about my digital gardenΒ§

1. What first inspired you to start your digital garden?Β§

I have been writing online in one form or another since I was a teenager. But, a few years ago, discovering software called [[org-roam]] led me to the present form of my digital garden.

Briefly, without wanting to bog us down in the tools themselves: org-roam is an extension to something called [[org-mode]], which is an extension to something called [[Emacs]], a long-standing free/open-source text editor. I had been using org-mode to record my notes locally for a while, but feeling a bit dissatisfied with it.

When I discovered org-roam, things really started to click for my note-taking. This is less so because of the tool, more so the patterns it encapsulates: freely writing and linking your notes together, helping you find them again, nurturing them to grow over time.

The development of org-roam itself was (I believe) inspired by [[Roam Research]] and [[Zettelkasten]], both of which had a bit of a moment in the sun a few years back.

Ultimately, though, the inspiration for keeping my digital garden is simply being interested in things, and wanted to both keep track of what I learn and encourage me to share it with others. And partly a desire to avoid the [[illusion of knowing]] - rather than just reading a lot of things and forgetting about them, encouraging myself to engage more closely and actively.

2. When did you first start your garden (online or in private)?Β§

In its current org-roam based incarnation, since March 2020.

However… if you start to get into the weeds (sorry for the pun) of what a digital garden is, in some ways I’ve been doing it for longer.

As mentioned, I have been posting online in one form or another for a long time. First in a few of those journal platforms that were around back then. Then blogging on my own site for a while. A brief, unfortunate detour into web 2.0 social media platforms. Then, about 10 years ago, playing around with static site generators rekindled my interest in hosting and posting on my own website. Not long after that, I discovered the [[IndieWeb]] community, and with that I really doubled down on doing things via my own website, not somebody else’s platform. That expanded into posting my notes to my own site, too, not just streaming/microblogging, which then became my digital garden.

3. How would you describe your digital garden to someone unfamiliar with the concept?Β§

It’s a place to inspire me to write, to learn and to create. It’s also a way to share those ideas without worrying about them needing to be polished or perfect. It’s a space of your own on the web, not subject to the algorithms and desires of a big tech company. It’s a mess, it’s a maze, it’s weird, it’s wonderful.

4. How do you decide what content to include or how to organize it?Β§

There’s not really a solid decision process behind this, but it goes something like this:

I have two gardens - one public and one private. (Bill Seitz refers to these as your inner and outer gardens (http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TendingYourInnerAndOuterDigitalGardens)) Anything related to my private life goes in my inner garden and will never be shared. Everything else I put in my ‘outer’ garden, which I publish online.

The content of my public garden is just a sprawling mass of, essentially, Things That I Am Interested In (Or Have Been At Some Point). I tend not to explicitly filter or organise this - for me the digital garden is a place of expression and exploration that grows organically. There is a little bit of structure in that I tend to write firstly in ‘journal’ pages, which is more the stream of thoughts, and anything I’d like to crystallize a bit further I will push through into one of the other pages in the garden on that topic.

I occassionally tend my garden, remove the odd weed, but not that often. While I always encourage people to have a wander around, it’s more of a wildflower meadow than a show garden.

5. How does it reflect your personal philosophy or approach to learning and creativity?Β§

My digital garden reflects my personal philosophy and approach to learning and creativity very closely. I believe that the learning process should allow you to explore freely and make mistakes - a digital garden fosters this by removing the expectation that what I write should be perfect, or complete, before it is ever shared. I also use it as a space for both divergent thinking, a grab bag of many threads of ideas, and convergent thinking, where I can narrow those ideas down into something cohesive. Some people say that it’s important to be a creator, not just a collector, but I have no issue if it sometimes just a space to collect snippets of knowlege - bookmarks, ideas and quotes from other people.

6. Has the process of maintaining your digital garden changed how you think about knowledge, organization, or growth?Β§

Yes. It has pushed me to appreciate knowledge more as a shared, evolving thing, rather than something you perfect in private before releasing to the world. It has also made me double down on an appreciation of subjective, rather than objective knowledge. On any given topic I am more interested in what someone in my trusted network has written about it before I go to Wikipedia for the ‘objective’ view on it.

Digital gardens certainly raise questions about organisation - is it better organise horizontally or vertically? A lot of discussions around digital gardens emphasise more of an unstructured, organic, horizontal, rhizomatic approach to organisation, which I fully enjoy as a personal learning approach, but I don’t wish to do this to the exclusion of vertical and narrative structure, threading thoughts together, which is occassionally vital as a way of communicating your ideas to others.

With regards to growth, I occassionally check in on how many pages of notes I have, which is fun but ultimately meaningless. Better to keep track of how many meaningful notes you have ([[Andy Matuschak]] calls these [[Evergreen notes]]; [[Ton]] uses the terms [[notion]]s). Andy says that the number of Evergreen notes written per day is the best indicator of your success as a knowledge worker. I disagree - to me, steady output of units of knowledge isn’t the end goal of my digital garden. Learning and sharing is. I [[prefer knowledge commoning over knowledge work]]. The goal is

7. Do you see your digital garden as more of a personal space, or does it also act as a tool for community and connection?Β§

While my digital garden is primarily a personal space, scratching my own itches, I keep it open and public in the hopes of connecting to like-minded others, and I fully intend for it to be part of a larger knowledge commons. I like the idea of the [[Nested-I]] - individual identities (gardens) joining together to build a greater collective.

The simple act of publishing it online, and asking people to contact me via email if they find something interesting, has itself brought about lots of interesting connections (this one included!).

There are other ways of connecting gardens together, such as [[sister sites]] and [[twin pages]]. Everything that I add to my digital garden I also cross-post to Anagora (https://anagora.org), which is a community that is building a shared prosocial knowledge commons.

8. Do you see digital gardens as evolving archives or more as real-time, personal thinking spaces?Β§

Both! The line is blurry but I tend to use my garden as both garden and stream ([[The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral]]). My journal pages are my real-time, personal thinking space, the notes from which tends to coalesce into more considered pages and thoughts, an evolving archive.

πŸ“š Agora node [[receiving webmentions on my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File receiving-webmentions-on-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Receiving webmentions on my digital gardenΒ§

Would be fun to be able to receive comments/annotations to my digital garden via webmentions.

As it is a static site, I’ll do it with webmentions.io and webmentions.js

webmention.ioΒ§

OK, so webmentions.io uses web log-in.

Alrighty, I’ll do that via relme auth.

First I’ll need to add some rel=me links.

Ha, sweet, I didn’t realise rel me login can work via email address!

That’s so cool. OK, so I added

<link rel="me" href="mailto:my@email.foo" />

to my head section for commonplace.doubleloop.net

and then signed in at webmention.io.

Now I can add

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/commonplace.doubleloop.net/webmention" /> <link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/commonplace.doubleloop.net/xmlrpc" />

to my head section.

ok, let’s give it a spin!

sending a webmentionΒ§

i can send webmentions from my existing indieweb blog at doubleloop.net

I sent one:

β₯… [[sending_a_webmention/2022-03-04_18-10-09_screenshot.png]]

and it arrived!

β₯… [[sending_a_webmention/2022-03-04_18-09-34_screenshot.png]]

It doesn’t work with my wikilink rewriting stuff. So I need to use the full URL (or fix the rewriting stuff) if I want to mention from my own site. Which wasn’t really the point, but actually could be interesting…

displaying webmentionsΒ§

ok so now i’ll try displaying received webmentions with webmentions.js

I followed the instructions at https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js

  • include script
  • add a div for webmentions
  • pop a teeny bit of styling in

β₯… [[displaying_webmentions/2022-03-04_18-20-27_screenshot.png]]

And it works!

That took about 40 minutes in total, super cool.

Needs some styling and tweaking and adding to all pages now. But that’s pretty epic.

Some thoughts:

  • how do I moderate mentions
  • I wonder if you can self host webmention.io
πŸ“š Agora node [[recent activity in neils digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File recent-activity-in-neils-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Recent activity in Neil’s Digital GardenΒ§

Recent ChangesΒ§

ChartismΒ§

Digital colonialismΒ§

Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of SurvivalΒ§

economic sanctionsΒ§

The US uses economic sanctions to exert power over other countriesΒ§

The DispossessedΒ§

My blog postsΒ§

IndieWeb Carnival June 2026: Big, left and rightΒ§

Free, Fair and AliveΒ§

Emacs Carnival: Useful built-ins: The describe family of commandsΒ§

Amazon doesn’t care how you heat swimming pools: ICT and ecosocialismΒ§

A review of The DispossessedΒ§

DegrowthΒ§

We cannot keep growing the global economy without overshooting planetary boundariesΒ§

colonialismΒ§

The United States is the frontrunner of digital colonialism by a long distanceΒ§

Digital colonialism is enacted by companies but enabled by statesΒ§

Big Tech companies are the primary vector for enacting digital colonialismΒ§

Digital colonialism is the use of digital technology for domination of another sovereign country or peopleΒ§

Digital self-governance is a necessary part of countering digital colonialismΒ§

Digital colonialism is a form of neocolonialismΒ§

Tracks that I have liked at some point in my life, in no particular orderΒ§

JammedΒ§

Aspen - Rejection LetterΒ§

future socialist societyΒ§

collaborative zettelkastenΒ§

Use Convivial ToolsΒ§

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyΒ§

Total Perspective VortexΒ§

Cumbria Wildlife TrustΒ§

flower-rich areaΒ§

SummerΒ§

solsticeΒ§

Summer solsticeΒ§

Climate campsΒ§

Filton 4Β§

Palestine ActionΒ§

Criminal damageΒ§

Terrorist sentence for Palestine Action activist marks ‘dangerous’ move against right to protestΒ§

Criminal damage is not terrorismΒ§

Neil’s Digital GardenΒ§

Climate Leviathan with Joel Wainwright and Geoff MannΒ§

Climate Leviathan with Geoff MannΒ§

Climate Leninism and Revolutionary TransitionΒ§

TerrorismΒ§

Terrorism is the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terrorΒ§

There are various definitions of terrorismΒ§

How Belfast knife attack became the latest far-right β€˜trigger event’§

πŸ“š Agora node [[refactoring some of the notes in my garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File refactoring-some-of-the-notes-in-my-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Refactoring some of the notes in my gardenΒ§

I’m going to experiment with refactoring some of my overstuffed concept notes.

Into smaller main notes, hub notes, and structure notes.

The impetus is from reading a few articles from Bob Doto. [[Crafting the Information You Capture in Main Notes]]; [[The Difference Between Hub Notes and Structure Notes Explained]]; and the one about collaborative zettelkasten.

The crafting article as it spurred me to realise that I tend to make quite overstuffed ‘concept’ notes. The hub and structure article as it made me think that my overstuffed concept notes are really more of a mixture of hub and structure note contained plenty main notes within them that can be pulled out. And the collaborative zettelkasten article makes me think about how best to share my notes on the Agora.

I’ll admit I am somewhat hesitant to just delete and start fresh with my overstuffed notes though. I quite like some of them and I like that they make easily discoverable my thoughts on a particular topic with the Agora, for example. So I’ll try to do it in such a way that that remains true.

If all goes to plan, I should end up with:

  • a bunch of new, reusable main notes on a topic;
  • a hub note linking to all of those;
  • and a structure note that’s pretty similar in flavour to my existing overstuffed concept note.

I think I’ll start with [[ecosocialism]] and [[digital ecosocialism]].

Notes along the wayΒ§

  • I am finding it hard to know what to tease out into a main note. I presume it’s an art that comes with experience.
  • I sometimes agonise a bit over the title of a main note, worrying if it captures the right thing, or not enough, or too much. That’s probably ok - it should require some thought - but I think partly I think it’s because I think I can’t change it afterwards without friction. It seems to inhibit the creation of main notes a little. That seems like a tooling issue to be improved.
πŸ“š Agora node [[reply to email questions about my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File reply-to-email-questions-about-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Reply to email questions about my digital gardenΒ§

Do you store your notes (second brain or otherwise) in one place, or across many apps/services/plain text files/napkin sketches/etc?Β§

I have a both a public, outer garden, and a private, inner garden. See Bill Seitz’s page on this for more info: http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TendingYourInnerAndOuterDigitalGardenspublic

I use org-mode, org-roam and Emacs for all of my writing. My private garden is where I do all my planning and todo management, too, with org-mode.

I also currently do freeform journalling occassionally in a paper notebook with pen. I’d like it to be a daily habit, but not there yet. I’ve been contemplating for about a year now getting one of the e-ink tablets for this, but haven’t yet. Haven’t been able to justify the price/purchase of a new device just yet.

As well as to my own website at https://commonplace.doubleloop.net, I also publish my garden to https://anagora.org , a collective space that combines multiple gardens together.

How often do you look up info in your notes, and how do you find what you’re looking for?Β§

Interesting question! I don’t have any stats, but anecdotally I would say that it is fairly infrequent. Let’s say the order of magnitude is weekly rather than daily. It’s most often when I want to share a link publicly as part of a social media discussion I’m having, and I want to point to some previous thinking on it. I always find what I’m looking for. org-roam has good title search and org-mode quick full text search of all notes. So it may take more or less time depending on how hazy my memory is of it, but it’s rare that I can’t find something that I know is there.

There’s probably things that I don’t remember are even in there though, which is another story.

If you need to look something up while you’re working outside of your notes, how difficult is it for you to get back into a flow state?Β§

Not too hard. Just by its nature social media can be a distraction if I need to look something up there. But I’m generally good at avoiding rabbit holes, and I tend to prefer reading in an e-reader or writing in Emacs to surfing the web anyway. All that said, given that I have a child, cat and a partner usually not that far away, I tend not to often get into a full flow state anyway. I’m generally in some kind of half-flow, and I’ve had plenty of practice at recovering back to that half-flow from external distractions.

πŸ“š Agora node [[roam garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File roam garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

roam gardenΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[roof garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File roof garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[root of my garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File root of my garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️
πŸ“š Agora node [[scan garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File gemini/scan_garden.py by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

(Python code, output might appear as a push if this Agora supports it.)

πŸ“š Agora node [[should i send webmentions from my digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File should-i-send-webmentions-from-my-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

Should I send webmentions from my digital garden?Β§

Contemplating whether I should send [[webmentions]] from my [[digital garden]].

Maybe, maybe not.

There’s plenty of ways to send webmentions from a static site, and plenty of people doing it.

So I could, but I wonder if I should.

Perhaps webmentions should only be sent when I post a more considered long-form article, or when I post something to my stream.

Not sure.

πŸ“š Agora node [[tend the garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File tend the garden.md by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž

[[tending the garden]]

πŸ“š Agora node [[tending the garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File tending the garden.md by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž

Feels like maintaining a bonzai tree

I feel like mainitaining the garden helps to motivate me to interact with it, especially if I am having difficulty wanting to add new information.

  • Maybe I don’t want to add new information because I feel like if the garden isn’t in a tidy state then I am just adding to the disorder

Don’t be afraid to edit existing notes/nodes, this is an [[ever expanding project]]

Work on link density

πŸ“š Agora node [[the garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File the-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

the GardenΒ§

For me, I see this as a metaphor for a [[personal wiki]] (generally in the sense of a [[personal knowledge management]] tool).

History of the metaphorΒ§

The Garden is an old metaphor associated with [[hypertext]]. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say β€œthe web as topology” or the β€œweb as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships

– The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

building out a network of often conflicting information into a web that can generate insights, iterating it, allowing that to grow into something bigger than a single event, a single narrative, or single meaning. – The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

PracticalitiesΒ§

What’s the difference between a digital garden, a note-taking app, and a blog? You can see the digital garden sitting between the two. It’s a place to share your evergreen notesβ€”not raw notes you may have stored in your note-taking app, but not quite the level of polish you would expect on a blog.

– How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki - Ness Labs

Here I would take ‘blog’ to mean blog articles, not [[stream]] per se. Plenty of unpolished stuff on the stream.

Over time, several posts in your digital garden may be combined to create longer essays to post on your blog, but it won’t necessarily be the case.

– How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki - Ness Labs

For me I see this as an important part of it - I definitely would like it to be the case.

In order to help you go from note collector to original content creator, your digital garden should ideally make it as easy as possible to explore the connection between various seeds of ideas so new ones can sprout. You want to interlink your notes and create a knowledge web unique to your mind and areas of interest.

– How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki - Ness Labs

It should aid [[pattern recognition]] / finding [[constellations]].

…in my view, "digital gardening" is a synomym for "personal knowledge gardening", where the term "knowledge gardening" was first coined as a synomym for Douglas Engelbart’s grand concept of Dynamic Knowledge Repositories and Networked Improvement Communities.

– Jack Park

πŸ“š Agora node [[thegarden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File TheGarden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[tiny garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File tiny garden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[unwalled garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File unwalled garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1394980907203842052

πŸ“œ File unwalled.garden.md by @vera β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“œ File unwalled garden.md by @anagora@matrix.org β˜† πŸ“Ž
πŸ“š Agora node [[urban garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File urban-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

urban gardenΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[using firn for publishing my org roam digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File using-firn-for-publishing-my-org-roam-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

using firn for publishing my org-roam digital gardenΒ§

https://theiceshelf.com/firn.html

Firn is a static site generator for org-mode. It is tailored for wikis, knowledge-bases, simple static sites &tc.

Just investigating it at the moment.

My org-publish build is so horrendously slow that I’m looking at alternatives. I like the idea of using something native to Emacs, but it’s just ridiculously slow to build my static site. It’s 4000 odd org files but it still shouldn’t be so slow.

Alternatively I’d dig in to how org-publish works and see if I can speed it up. I’ve tried that a little before though and didn’t get very far.

IssuesΒ§

Space usageΒ§

First issue I’ve encountered with firn: while my commonplace folder is about 423M, the firn build folder reaches around 2.9G. I have so little space currently available on my drive that I run out of space. Time to free up some space…

Why is it so big? Each file is around 720K, nearly a megabyte. I think it’s because each page has the sitemap rendered in the site, and it’s huge.

If I remove the sitemap from _firn/layouts/default.html then it’s a much more sensible size at 59M.

Second issue seems to be that all the links in my org files are id links, not files links. The rendered output is using those id links, which don’t resolve to anything a webserver can serve.

According to theiceshelf/firn#107 {Documentation} Any plans for more documentation on `org… , this is kind of by design.

Think my journey with firn ends here for now.

πŸ“š Agora node [[using ox hugo for publishing my org roam digital garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File using-ox-hugo-for-publishing-my-org-roam-digital-garden.md by @neil β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

using ox-hugo for publishing my org-roam digital gardenΒ§

https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/

Seems like a pretty long-lived and stable option for org-mode publishing.

IssuesΒ§

Prefers one post per org subtreeΒ§

Fair enough, but that’s not how org-roam works. Hopefully having one post per org file doesn’t equate to being a second class citizen in ox-hugo.

hugo frontmatter propertiesΒ§

Turns out that that is a problem. You seem to need to manage various #+hugo_ properties per file. That’s fine if you have one file. Not if you’ve got over 4000 files.

That said, it has some org-roam files in its test site, and these don’t seem to have hugo front matter in them. Is it done with dir-locals? https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/tree/main/test/site/content-org/org-roam

Maybe not: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/ox-hugo/issues/101

Huh. Should give it a whirl to see for myself, but not now.

ResourcesΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[walled garden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File walled garden.md by @flancian β˜† πŸ“Ž οΈπŸ”— ✍️

walled gardenΒ§

πŸ“š Agora node [[walledgarden]] (pulled by the Agora)
πŸ“œ File WalledGarden.md by @agora@botsin.space β˜† πŸ“Ž