# 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](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#3-imperfection--learning-in-public), 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier) 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](/content/garden/index.html)