Organizing the garden

🌿 Budding

Planted 3 years ago Planted 11/09/2023 5:38 am

Last tended a year ago Last tended 01/04/2025 10:05 pm

Overview

I've borrowed more terms from IRL gardening to describe digital gardening concepts.

The garden is composed of Plants (aka articles) that are in varying stages of growth. Every plant has a Sign (aka metadata) that describes its time here in the garden.

The Planted date is the date the article was first added.

The Last tended date is when the article was last updated. I typically only update this date when I make a change to the content, but not when fixing broken links, correcting typos, etc.

By default both the Planted and Last tended dates show the amount of time that has passed since the respective date (e.g. "Planted 2 years ago"). You can click either of these to toggle the display to an absolute date/time (e.g. "Planted 05/11/2023 5:00 am").

Borrowing from Maggie Appleton's garden, the Status is a rough indicator of how "done" I feel an article is:

• 🌱 Seedling: A very rough and early idea. Often just some notes.
• 🌿 Budding: Cleaned up and presentable, but still missing some content.
• 🌳 Evergreen: Reasonably complete, but I will still tend these over time.

URLs

I've opted to use GUIDs for file names/urls of articles. While generally I think its best practice for websites to leverage user-friendly URLs, it doesn't quite support the constantly evolving content of a digital garden.

The main problem I want to avoid is initially naming an article something lame (because naming things is hard) and then coming up with a better name later. With the GUID approach, the filename/URL stays the same and I'm free to update the title whenever I want.

You may find a handful of early articles (like this one) that have a normal looking URL. I planted these prior to the GUID decision, and it seemed easier to leave them be than setup redirects.

This is a digital garden, not a blog 🌻 Learn more