I’ve had a few people ask what I mean when I call this site a digital garden, so it felt worth explaining properly. Well, explaining it in my own way, and what it basically means to me, so purists will hate this bit.
A digital garden is a way of writing and sharing ideas online that focuses more on growth than polish. Instead of treating every post like a finished article that gets published and forgotten, a digital garden gives you space to plant ideas, come back to them, improve them, and link them to other thoughts over time.
A traditional blog is usually developed and written for an audience, whereas a digital garden is more like an open workspace where you can think out loud and cultivate ideas over time. It is often a very personal space, and many of its notes may only ever be seen by the person tending the garden.
That is what I want this place to be.
In addition to being written for others, a normal blog usually works as a timeline: the newest post sits at the top, older posts gradually drop further down, and everything is arranged by date. A true digital garden often feels different, with content organised by context and connections using links, tags, or visual maps.
I still have a chronological mindset, though, and digital gardens are personal and flexible, so that is how mine will be organised, alongside plenty of tagging, at least for now. One issue is that I developed this myself using Blogger. While I love how it looks and feels, the functionality is still quite blog-like... but, as I said, I’m comfortable with that.
Digital gardens are also less concerned with looking finished. “Posts” are allowed, and even encouraged, to remain works in progress. My simple approach is that I’ll often have an idea, or just something I want to record, and create a note. Over time, it may be worked on and expanded, but it will rarely be finished in the traditional sense.
Now, this is the tricky bit for me. I’m a marketer by trade, so publishing unfinished work is a very foreign concept, and I do find it difficult. However, by forcing myself to do it, I usually have a few seed posts on here.
Like a real garden, nothing here is ever truly finished. In a real garden, you add things, move things, cut things back, and sometimes leave a patch alone until you know what to do with it. A digital garden works in much the same way. Some posts here are more complete than others. Some are simply ideas that needed somewhere to live. Some may grow into something better later, while others will remain very simple notes.
That is part of the appeal for me. I hate social media anyway, particularly reading everyone else’s ridiculous whinging or what they had to eat. This place gets me away from all that and gives me room to think, without pretending that every piece of writing needs to please anyone or become a final draft.
As well as seed posts, which are initial ideas, I move them to sprout when they are a little more developed, and then to flower when I consider them more or less complete. You can navigate to these different stages from the homepage.
You’ll also notice that I use a two-date system on my posts and notes. The “Planted” date is effectively when I first created the post, while the “Last Tended” date shows the most recent time I amended any part of it. Note to self: look at arranging posts by their Last Tended date!
It is also a very personal format. A garden reflects the person looking after it, and a digital garden does the same. Mine is a mixture of stories, notes, opinions, half-formed ideas, rants, things I want to remember, and things I simply did not want to lose in the endless mess of phones, folders, and old platforms.
I’ll be honest, organising it has probably been the hardest part of doing this. I’m not the most organised person in the world, as I’m sure my wife would agree.
I’ve gone through several different versions of the labels, and I’ll probably change them again. That is not a failure; it is simply part of building something like this and learning in public, which is another important trait of a digital garden. The structure is still evolving, which feels quite fitting. It is meant to be a living space, not a fixed system.
Because I built this using Blogger rather than a dedicated digital garden platform, some parts are a compromise. As I mentioned earlier, posts still appear in chronological order, which is more traditional blog than digital garden. At some point, I may look at arranging them by their amended or “Last Tended” date, so the most recently updated posts appear at the top, but that is not a priority for me right now.
The deeper linking between ideas, another cornerstone of digital gardens, is also still a work in progress. I’d like to add more of that over time because that is where a digital garden really starts to become interesting. It becomes less about scrolling through posts and more about wandering through connected thoughts. By the way, for anyone interested, there is a link in the footer to the Digital Garden Blogger theme I developed.
Even though Blogger is not the perfect platform for it, the site is starting to feel right, and it works for me.
If you enjoy a particular kind of post, the labels at the end should help you find similar ones. Closely related posts, or posts that borrow snippets and ideas from others, are also linked together.
I’ve also started doing a little more curation, which I think matters. In a real garden, you place certain plants together because they look right next to each other. The same idea applies here. I have a Stories section that brings my original fiction together in one place, and a Best Of section on the homepage for posts I think deserve a little more attention.
There is also a Now page, inspired by the wider Now page idea. It is a simple page that I update from time to time to show what I’m focused on at that particular moment. It is less about polished content and more about placing a current marker in the ground.
Comments are turned off, and that is deliberate. This space is not really built around discussion. It is more about expression, collection, and exploration. I’m not putting things here to chase approval; I have never needed that. I’m putting them here because I want somewhere for them to exist.
You cannot like or dislike anything either. All of that feels too much like social media, which, as I’ve already established, I don’t particularly like.
The freedom and flexibility are the biggest differences between this site and some of the others I run. On other websites, I think about search traffic, keyword use, structure, and all the usual SEO details. Here, I mostly just write. That makes it feel calmer, more honest, and, for me, much more enjoyable.
If someone finds their way here and enjoys something, or finds it useful, that is a bonus. Any post can also be shared simply by copying its URL 😀
I have also added a site search, which I use quite a lot myself. That matters more than I originally expected. Once a site begins to grow, being able to find old ideas quickly becomes increasingly important.
So, that is my version of a digital garden. I realise I’ve rambled on and perhaps haven’t collected my thoughts in an entirely logical order, but you know what? That is rather the point of a digital garden.
It is not perfect. It is not finished. It is a little messy around the edges. But that feels right to me. It is personal, it is still growing, and it gives me somewhere to write without feeling that everything has to be polished, packaged, and done.
For me, that is the whole point.
For anyone interested, I have also produced a list of things I’d like to change here at some point. My digital landscaping, I suppose you could call it.
