But it is not there yet.
I have been fascinated with this concept of Digital Gardens ever since I stumbled upon this fascinating, life-changing (I tend to get a bit carried away) thread by Maggie Appleton. She also has a very good article on her website about the subject.
I really liked this idea of organising one's writing in a more topographical and interlinked fashion, instead of mere chronological listing. Actually, I was fascinated by all those ideas: that gardens are never finished, but always growing and evolving and changing, that gardens are playful and experimental, that they are imperfect by design and that they can be a form of learning in public (or of storing and linking knowledge -- something that interests me very much).
I've been, for many years, trying to organise information in many different (incomplete) attempts. People tend to see me as a source of interesting references, but the truth is that I don't have a system, or I guess the personal traits, or the time (I am a parent of two small kids, mind) to keep everything neat, accessible and organised. Along these years, I've tried Evernote, then plain text files with markdown, then Google Docs, then back to plain text files, but using Obsidian... and now what I have is a huge mess of notes, images and links scattered over all these services / formats. Good job!
What attracted me about the plain text files is their "durability". As long as we have computers, there will be a way of reading plain text files. That's not so much true for proprietary formats and services that depend on some company. But they are limited in the way we can present, and style information.
So, I need the perenity of text files, but also with increased capabilities regarding linking, styling and presenting their content? Hello? Have you ever heard about HTML? Don't you have a website?
Oh, so let's build this Digital Garden! I approached it as I approach many of my non-mandatory (that is, not work or kids related) endeavors: I started thinking about its interface, of drawing a garden, with paths, patches, "reserves", all with beautiful 8-bit graphics reminiscent of the RPG and Adventure games I loved when I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s. Of course I don't know how to do any of that, so... hey, a course about 8-bit game scenario! Of course I bought it. Of course I have not started it.
But then I realised I was losing sight of what a digital garden is: something experimental, imperfect, incomplete. And here I am, starting this thing with a simple textual list of one item, which contains simply some copy-pasted text of a really interesting text I read.
It's a start. It'll grow.
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