Digital Garden
A personal website as something you tend, not something you finish.
Thinking about a personal website as a digital garden is a metaphor that resonates with me. Not only because I’m fond of green things that grow, but because my experience with technology—and with websites in particular—has proved to me that these things need tending.
A garden is a personal thing. It reflects its caretaker’s sense of aesthetics, along with their tastes and preferences. It’s both a sanctuary and, in some sense, a factory.
I’ve been working on the infrastructure for my own garden for four years, off and on. Only recently have I started actually compiling anything and writing it down.
Ideas for a Taxonomy
Most topics sit in one of four stages of growth:
- Seedling — very rough ideas or concepts, often stream-of-consciousness
- Sprout — ideas starting to take their form, edited and honed a little
- Sapling — ideas developing roots, reevaluated, with the weak parts pruned
- Steady, or evergreen — established, and mostly needing only pruning from here
Some topics aren’t a single concept, though, and exist to hold others:
- Trellis — a topic that collects other topics and gives them support
- Perennial — a topic that’s continuously updated and will never be finished