Some time ago I stumbled upon the concept of digital gardening. Started reading about it particularly on a bunch of digital gardens that are super inspiring and full of ideas, easy to follow and get lost in. For example Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden and Carol's. There are plenty of less elaborate examples out there, but as a maker and a software engineer, I found the idea of having a place to develop ideas over time really appealing.

I have a blog that I have kept for a few years now, because I like to sew, and I used to knit and crochet too. This blog has followed my trajectory through the fiber arts/skill development, knitpick.me. Whilst I love writing posts for my blog, I have found it has several shortcomings:

• I am interested in other things that have nothing to do with fibers and fabric, and even though I posted something about building a keyboard once, it felt completely out of place there.
• A sewing project may last anything from a few hours to a few years. And a blog is normally the place where I post things after I have finished them. I had been missing on being able to post through the process, because for me, the finished product is nor really the point of my sewing, but the creative path and learning new skills as I am making something is, and this gets slightly lost when all you do is a blog entry at the end of the project. I tried a few times to do a blog post per step in the process and that got tedious really soon. The blog was not the right place for it.
• At any given time I have a few personal projects ongoing, from digitising pictures for a family album to sewing a bag, or a quilt, a present for someone, or learning about a new topic I have never been interested in before. A digital garden seems like the perfect place to keep track of those things without them becoming overwhelming because of context changes. The context is always there for you to pick up where you left off.
• Sometimes I learn something at work, or have some personal philosophical disagreement with myself, and short of keeping a handwritten journal, there are few places where to keep track of those. A digital garden with notes, like this one, seems like the perfect place to keep those thoughts and develop the ones that evolve into something else, whilst abandoning the ones that are not going places. In a physical journal, same as in a blog, you are bound by when you wrote something and the reality at that point in time, you are not supposed to go back and keep evolving your thinking.
• I love music, and sometimes I launch into a learning spree of musical things. Again, nothing to do with fabric, not really something to start writing in a journal at random to never read again, but something that I'd love to develop in written form over time.
• I like to make mechanical keyboards, and have a pipeline of those always in the making or waiting to be made. Keeping track of what went into each and why is important to me.

I am going to experiment with the idea of having a digital garden and am really curious as to how it'll evolve over time, and whether it will reflect how my thinking changes over time, too.

Article lifecycle

One of the most interesting things about articles in a digital garden is the concept of idea or article lifecycle. An article may be early stages of development and can evolve over time to evolve, until it is deemed to have reached completion. For my garden, I have chosen the following development stages:

	Sprout. At this stage the article or note is early days, the seed of an idea has been planted, but there is no way to tell whether it will keep growing or not.
	Seedling. At this stage the write-up has gone through a couple of iterations and some extra thought has been put into it.
	Budding. At this stage the article is starting to look more finished and has some content that has had time to simmer over time.
	Flowering. At this stage the article is fully thought out and ready for wider consumption.

Creation date vs last watered date

Articles and notes are created at some point in time and then updated at various points over time. The last watered date serves as a reminder of the last time a particular article was last modified.

Backlinks

Another interesting characteristic of Digital Gardens is the highly connected content they have. No idea is ever developed in the vacuum, so this page has links, at the end of every article to all of those articles that reference it within the garden.

Types of articles

I have decided to start just by writing notes and articles. This is a totally arbitrary decision that will probably change over time, but it seemed like as good place to start as any other.

Comments

Whilst comments are a nice to have, this is a feature that I have decided to add at a later time, once I have some more content on the site. Having had a knitting blog for years and just 1 comment from a genuine reader (the rest of them were all bots and spam), I am not in a hurry to add comments to this site for the time being.

How about social media interactions

I am not a big fan of social media, even though I have presence on some sites, I am not super excited about linking my ideas and thoughts to any particular social media site. Some of them are useful for career networking, some others are useful to keep in touch with like-minded people and others are full of manipulative individuals and groups that all they do is confuse. I have no appetite at this time in my life for this kind of content.