digital gardening

21 Apr, 2025

So, like. Digital Gardens. I heard about them a while ago when i read a blogpost from, Miriam Suzanne, i think?
Essentially, it's the idea of creating your own small personal wikipedia - back linking to old stuff whenever you can, and letting people explore your blog through those links, not an archive sorted by time of publishing. It's the idea of turning your blog into a well curated garden where you go back and refine a blogpost later, treating it more like a wiki.

I like the concept, obviously.
We've all fallen down weird link rabbitholes on Wikipedia or tvtropes at some point. It's fun! It's more of that adventurous, wild west feeling of the "old" internet, deliberately making your blog less "efficient". In a time where the first five pages of results for the word blog are just about monetization and "optimizing audience retention", that does resonate with me.

So when I first heard about the concept, I was totally on board!

Sign me up baby, time to get out that lawnmower or whatever.

But as i thought more about it.
Eh? I'm not sure i really care for digital gardening. I like the idea, sure. Be less commercial, more human. Make exploring your blog fun.

But it doesn't really fit into my particular "philosophy" of doing things.

When I first started my blog, i made the decision to never delete or edit anything, no matter how stupid it may look to me in retrospect. Sure, I'll fix typos when i see them (most of the time) but that's about it.

This is mainly because I am:

1. lazy
2. A perfectionist.

This very fun combination of personality traits results in me taking ages to write things and then deleting them & the entire blog a day later because i thought they sucked and made me look dumb.

So, i made the conscious decision to set myself the rule of never editing anything. Just put it out there, if it sucks it's whatever. At least when i look back at it one day I'll be able to derive some entertainment out of that. Making a hard rule like that has allowed me to actually get things done.

Now, if i were to start doing digital gardening I'd have to at least go back and add links to other posts to all the stuff I've already published. I don't really want to do that.

Those posts are a reflection of me at the time of posting them.
Editing them after the fact feels a bit like revisionist history to me.¹ What i enjoy most about personal blogs is seeing a snapshot of the authors personality from a particular point in time. Being able to time travel to see what i was like one month or even a year ago is so incredibly interesting and also gives some perspective i would not have had otherwise. I guess I'm more of a digital message in a bottle kind of person.