gardener's guide
The concept of digital gardening is really an umbrella term to describe anything in the middle ground between a blog and a notes app. As such the meaning and structure of them will change significantly from person to person. This page will provide a better description of what a digital garden means to me, and will hopefully help any viewers to better understand why I've designed the website in its current state.
I took inspiration from Mark Bernstein's essay [ Hypertext Gardens ] when creating this collection. In it he compares some websites to wildernesses: intruiging, with the promise of interesting discoveries, but at the cost of being difficult to navigate. Others are more akin to cities, with their highly efficient layouts and user-friendly, if repetitive and ultimately unexciting, design. Gardens however, strike a balance between these two landscapes. They offer the allure of the wilderness in a more safe and contained environment.
Some pages on this site are not listed on any internal index; they may only be accessed either by their direct link or by stumbling across them through other pages. This is perhaps not a "smart" web design choice, but it does incentivise a more in-depth exploration of the content for those who, like me, prefer that style of navigation. The virtues of flattened layouts where everything is accessible within a few clicks have been extolled to no end by various design sources, but the most engaging experiences I've had online have been with websites that take the opposite approach. So often the tangents and distractions I experience in my search for some specific piece of information are more insightful than the piece itself.
my intentions for this garden
At the moment I'm still experimenting with the current hyperminimal design for this website. However, if I wanted a totally standardised series of notes I'd just use [ obsidian ]. I have a vague notion to play around with the structure and format of the text more in future works, rotating it and altering the font for a start. I do very much intend to keep these pages as lightweight as possible though, which means no javascript and ideally minimal CSS.