Digital Gardening
I really like the term "digital garden" because it makes me imagine a person carefully tending to something, over time, trimming and growing and adding little signs and walking paths.
I think what makes a "digital garden" unique from other, more traditional forms of "publishing" is that it brings along the idea that you’ll be tending to your garden.
One of the most freeing things I ever did was to realize that I could (and should) go back and fix articles and update them as I learn more or change my mind about things.
I could even make "stub" pages for topics and maybe finish them later!
Why did I ever think otherwise?
I absolutely love Amy Hoy’s How the Blog Broke the Web (stackingthebricks.com). I’ll quote it, but it’s so good. You should really just go read the whole thing.
We built every new page by hand. When we had more than one web page, we built the navigation by hand. We managed our Table of Contents by hand… When we updated a page, we slapped a little "NEW!" graphic on it.
Then along came blogging platforms/systems and:
Suddenly, instead of building their own system, they were working inside one. A system someone else built… It was a trap.
She’s using Movable Type (wikipedia.org) as the initial canonical example, but this applies to everything:
Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY… Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. […] Movable Type was designed by bloggers who wrote new diary entries every single day. The form followed that function slavishly. […] The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died.
Which expresses something I felt, but never put words to. A single format for a website is constricting.
On top of that, the chronological feed style of website organized around the blog (and published in full to your RSS feed, of course!) encourages you to get a page just right and then hit PUBLISH and never touch that page again.
A website can be a newspaper. It can be an encyclopedia. It can be anything! A personal website should be what that person wants it to be.
A website you never edit is like building yourself a house where you can only arrange the contents of the rooms once.
And about that chronological order…
An RSS feed is great, but…
One of the best things I did, after a number of requests, was add a feed to this website. (Ratfactor’s "RSS" (Atom, to be precise) feed.)
But I decided early on that I was going to use it my way.
When I added a feed, I didn’t turn this website into a blog. I just kept doing what I normally do.
I update this site almost daily. But it’s often very trivial changes like fixing spelling errors.
You do not want a feed of every little change I make.
Further, you probably do not share every one of my 12,371,982 interests. So getting a flood of updates to every section of this site would be ridiculous. (And I’m not going to make a feed for every section, sorry. I’m probably never going to do that.) Don’t worry, there’s plenty of variety to the feed as it is.
As I elaborate on Explanation of the Ratfactor Feed, the feed is how I let you know that I’ve added something I want you to know about.
For everything else, you’ll have to visit, browse, and bookmark parts you’re interested in. If you subscribe to the feed, the intermittant updates will probably jog your memory that there was a section you wanted to check on.
See also Forever Worlds and What should a personal website be?
Other people’s thoughts
Maggie Appleton does a great job of tracing the many possible evolving meanings of gardening a website in A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (maggieappleton.com).
Joel Hooks writes in My blog is a digital garden, not a blog (joelhooks.com):
What makes a garden is interesting. It’s personal. Things are organized and orderly, but with a touch of chaos around the edges.