This may turn into a blog someday, but for now it’s just a convenient place to publish links, saved webpages, notes, and random thoughts.
Truth be told, I don’t know whether really want a published digital garden; I think I want a blog. Indeed, I have one. Well, several. But I haven’t updated any of them in a long time because they need reworked in order to be functional. Also, back when I was blogging I was using MacJournal as my journaling software, which has great support for uploading to blogs. But it’s never had a decent iOS app, and after MacJournal for iPhone ate much of a long blog entry I had composed, I gave up and finished switching to Evernote for journaling (after flirting with OneNote and, until it died, Springpad). Which meant I stopped blogging as well, because although Evernote does allow you to easily publish notes on the Web, a feature I’ve used on occasion, it’s hardly a blogging function.
And so my blogs have languished, because it was too much work to get them back up to functioning well, and my blogging software (still MacJournal, whose Mac client continues to work fine) was no longer my primary journaling platform.
But a year or two ago, I started messing around with Obsidian, initially because Matter, an awesome new read-it-later app I’d been using, started supporting it as a way to sync notes and highlights out of the app. I strongly approve of having backups of my notes and thoughts, so I checked it out. It’s pretty good! It’s not yet really polished, and I’m not the biggest fan of one of its core features—editing in Markdown instead of rich text[1]—but it seems robust, actively developed, and highly functional and customizable. Plus, it’s free! And I’m intrigued by the “linking your thinking” concept. This idea works very nicely with importing my notes and highlights from Matter, and gave me thoughts of a better way of doing something I’ve wanted, and tried, to do for a long time: Create an easily accessible database of all the quotes I’ve collected over the years. With Obsidian’s transclusion feature, not to mention all that Dataview can do, being able to import my book notes, article highlights, etc., and format them in such a way that all the relevant quotes magically appeared in an organized, searchable way very much interested me. And after they finally got a mobile app (I do most of my leisure writing, etc. on an iPad Pro nowadays), I started messing with it on a semi-regular basis. I even developed a Shortcut or two to help myself and others use the mobile app more effectively (seriously, check out Save to Obsidian if you use Obsidian on iOS/iPadOS).
And there it stood for a year or so, until recently, when Evernote itself started eating my data. On both iPhone and iPad, when I wrote a note and then switched out of the app, or put the device to sleep, I would come back to discover that the last few words I had written were missing. Then the same thing happened, except to several paragraphs. That was the final straw (after several previous questionable and frustrating moves on Evernote’s part, an interface that has always been glitchy, plus basic features still missing after many years), and I decided that it was time to ditch Evernote and lean into Obsidian full force.
Of course none of the above explains the existence of this garden/blog/archive/whatever it is. Well, I’ve long been aware that Obsidian offered a hosting service, but at $20/mo, that was far out of my price range for a personal blog. Then I stumbled upon a random Reddit post that mentioned Quartz, a free way to host your Obsidian vault. But it was confusing and technical, and looked like it wasn’t as simple as publishing content from within the app. However, looking into that some more, I discovered Digital Garden, an Obsidian plugin whose documentation walks you through the entire process of setting up free hosting, and allows publishing any note in your vault by adding a tag to its frontmatter! Perfect.
So here I am, trying it out! Welcome! We’ll see what develops.
Okay, so this digital garden thing is starting to clarify. This article[2] discusses the notion of a digital garden as “a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time”:
Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you're hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar's Number. It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.[3]
This would seem one way to fix something that has always bothered me about blogs: That they work like newspaper articles instead of encyclopedia entries. In other words, once you publish a blog entry, it is—and is intended to be—fixed, a record of a particular moment in time. This isn’t just about linkrot (though people—not me—do seem to be reluctant to update links in old blog posts for that reason); it’s about the content itself. Sure, bloggers might update the post with new info, but they rarely change the content much—and if they do, they usually explicitly say “edit:” or use strikethrough to indicate a change…and it would seem dishonest if they didn’t. That format is just fine for, say, journal entries[4] (the original purpose of web logs), but not for how many (including me) have used them, instead using them as repositories for informative articles, or other content that would be better served as a webpage rather than a blog entry, except that blogs are so easy to write and publish. The digital garden format fixes that problem by having individual pages that aren’t expected to be associated with a particular date or remain fixed, but are even easier to write, publish, and update than a blog.
I am also interested—though more hesitantly—in the notion of an evolving and unpolished online presence:
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.
Evolving I have little problem with. That’s what’s great about this format: That it can easily accommodate editing, restructuring, and improvement over time. But publishing something incomplete or unpolished I am much more trepidatious about. But that’s ameliorated somewhat by the tags that folks are using to distinguish various levels of completeness: #seedling🌱, #budding🌿, and #evergreen🌲. Maybe this is a good thing; maybe it will encourage me to publish developing thoughts, which will get them out there sooner and maybe encourage me to develop them further. I don't know.
A tiny Markdown rant: Markdown is very useful for its intended purpose: Writing formatted text that needs to also be readable as plain text. That's it. That's all. If you're writing something in plain text (like, say, a Facebook comment) and you'd like to use some formatting in it, Markdown is for you. But if you're writing in an environment that always understands Markdown and displays it prettily, and have access to keyboard commands like Cmd-I that inserts formatting codes, there's no reason to use Markdown. Use rich text. Or HTML. Yes, Markdown can be read everywhere, by any plain-text editor, and that's an advantage. But not enough to overcome its disadvantages. After all, plenty of things can parse HTML, too. What we really need is a universal cross-platform rich-text standard, and it's asinine that we still don't have one. ↩︎
I detest “this” or “this article” (or “click here”) links. Hypertext (now there’s a word we never see anymore!) should always make sense when printed out. But Jesus it’s so awkward sometimes. How do you refer to an article? How did we do it before the Web? I guess we would say “an article in…” but what is this article in? It’s on some random website no one has ever heard of. Somebody needs to invent a new convention here. ↩︎
I really wish I could transclude/embed parts of webpages—not just in Obsidian, but in other webpages. I always loved Apple’s old “publish and subscribe” concept, however clunky the implementation was. Of course, the Web is so transient that you’d have to keep a cache in case it vanished. Maybe this should be part of Web3. ↩︎
OMG that looks terrible in dark mode! ↩︎