6 ms·

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

87 points by polm23 6y ago

nikivi 6y ago
I have so much content in my garden now that I want to do some deep data science on it soon :D https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge
asdfman123 6y ago
I think a lot of us programmers did this years ago when it was still deeply uncool. We need to bring back geocities subdomains for this purpose.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Next best thing: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- ketzo 6y ago
  I genuinely think there's a big desire out there for an easy way to carve out a small, personalized niche of the internet, a la GeoCities/MySpace.
  - tradesmanhelix 6y ago
    You're not wrong: https://neocities.org https://neocities.org
charliebrownau 6y ago
Isnt the whole point of going into the garden is to get away from Internet and tech ?
TrueDuality 6y ago
Isn't this simply talking about personal websites? They haven't gone away, a lot moved to wordpress which gives them a cookie cutter feel, but a lot of other ones are still independent and feel like they're on their own.
- brudgers 6y ago
  Wordpress is agribusiness that's why Wordpress sites tend toward uniformity.
- superkuh 6y ago
  Yes. It's a rebranding. But I've used the term before myself when trying to highlight the two classes of web that exist today. http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-02-22-1.html http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-02-22-1.html
- mikestew 6y ago
  They haven't gone away, a lot moved to wordpress which gives them a cookie cutter feel If you come to my WordPress site to ogle my amazing, individual, and unique web design skills, then you definitely came for the wrong reasons.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Of course, but doesn't "digital gardens" sound much nicer and friendlier? That's the point.
- tvanantwerp 6y ago
  I think it's a move away not from WordPress specifically, but the kind of structure a "blog" providers. Personal sites for so long have been: home, about, portfolio, blog. Digital gardens seem to be more along the lines of: I'm gonna dump whatever I want here in whatever style and structure I like because it's my site and you can't tell me no.
- SamBam 6y ago
  From the description, this is more about personal wikis or notebooks. Individual pages may get edited again and again, and nothing is necessarily in a "polished for publication" state. In exploring new notebook apps -- like Notion, which allows you to publish pages and subpages -- I've found numerous examples of people having basically their own notebooks open on the web, such as https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ https://notes.andymatuschak.org/
  - 6y ago
mxmilkb 6y ago
https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
IffyBog 6y ago
I've been considering starting my own after discovering this and looking through a few not too long ago. I wouldn't have time to keep up with it as of now, but I think it would be great (and would probably serve the same mental benefits) as some form of journal. But I'm not as brave as you all, so I bet it would be best for me to have a several year delay on a "public" side of my own, personal digital garden.
Havoc 6y ago
That sorta reflects how I've been feeling about digital infrastructure lately too. Anything I can self-host is a win purely to maintain some sense of control, continuity and sanity.
jpereira 6y ago
For a bit I was running these "Personal Website Tours"[0] and had a couple of folks mentioned in this article do one! They're basically just an interview around their websites, how they maintain them, how they originated. It's fascinating seeing the different workflows people come up with, and how they intersect with their personal goals. Having your own website is an incredibly powerful tool because of the diversity of ways you can use it. It's only getting easier to do so, especially with the massive amount of static site generators available today. I do think it can get even more accessible though. I ran a lil course [1] earlier this month that aimed to provide a supportive environment for people getting started with it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXbN99LY3OCarUeXcxWeZzOelXQvVdAA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXbN99LY3OCarUeXcxWe... [1]: https://hyperlink.academy/courses/internet-homesteading/22 https://hyperlink.academy/courses/internet-homesteading/22
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Check this podcast out[1]. Guest speaks about their personal website (and HTML energy). EDIT: hey, your tours are absolutely awesome! [1] https://html.energy/ https://html.energy/
  - jpereira 6y ago
    Thanks! I'm a big fan of html.energy. Also, I'm planning on picking up the tours again soon, so if you, or anyone else, has some suggestions for folks it'd be cool to see, let me know!
tradesmanhelix 6y ago
No affiliation (beyond being a happy user myself), but I really feel like https://neocities.org https://neocities.org is a wonderful little project that makes it easy to create one's own digital garden like this article is talking about. Much love to them and similar projects. The old web isn't gone, you just have to know where to look, which is very "old web" anyway, right? :)
twerwhhgfdhdd 6y ago
I have some varied interests - conlangs, local history, retrocomputing, music theory, etc. And a while ago, I noticed I would watch a lot of videos or browse a lot of articles about these topics, but I wasn't absorbing much. Nor was I doing anything with this knowledge. So I changed my focus - I would organize the information I was getting, write my own personal conclusions, and start digging through primary sources (and in the case of applied knowledge, actually try things out). And it worked! I feel my knowledge of things has deepened, and my interests have been rekindled. It's a lot of fun and very relaxing to do. Essential to all this is a personal wiki that I keep. I'm using Zim (https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org) which most of you are probably familiar with. I don't often publish anything there - it's just local files, for now. Never heard of "Digital Gardens" but based on the reddit group they mentioned in the article, it looks like there is an emerging community of people doing this.
- bausano_michael 6y ago
  What does music theory mean to you? Is there a mathematical introductory take on the topic? Can it be studied without an interest in music, but rather for appreciation of patterns? I've seen the term many times before in context I found appealing, but the wiki page talks mainly about the connection to actual music.
  - twerwhhgfdhdd 6y ago
    When I talk to other musicians, most use the term "music theory" to refer to the technical side of musical composition - understanding scales, rhythmic divisions, approaches to harmony, etc. A lot of this isn't really theoretical per se, at least not in the scientific sense, and I know a nitpicky guitar teacher with a masters degree who insists it's wrong to call this 'music theory' (and I suppose he also corrects people whenever they say the new millennium started in 2000). And then there's the real 'theoretical' music theory, which does what you might expect: theorizes how music works. What is music? What makes music good? What makes a particular song 'tick'? This can get pretty abstract, and might involve some nifty math. Still not strictly scientific, though there may be some science involved. If you have a theory as to what makes good music, you're naturally going to write music that tests your theory, hence the association between music theory and compositional practice. They are technically distinct, but most musicians use the term loosely. So that's probably where you're confused. I would not recommend learning about music theory unless you're interested in actual music. Most of your time learning music theory will be spent analyzing actual music, so if you don't like it you're gonna have a bad time. And personally, the benefit of music theory for me is applying its lessons to music that I write. So if you don't even like music, I'm not sure what the appeal would be.
h0p3 6y ago
Throwing my hat in the ring: https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Looks great. Unfortunately it overrides the back button, which could be an issue.
  - h0p3 6y ago
    Well, thank you. And, I appreciate your honesty. I would not be surprised if you already know what I think on the matter. You seem to have a strong grasp of how to do it well. I am able to navigate back on my browser, but it requires an extra step. I am not terribly competent, and I've lots of things to work on. I think the backbutton overriding is a small price to pay. I realize it may bounce some people, and that's okay too. I think my empathic interlocutors end up requiring foolish degrees of curiosity and even tolerance for far larger hiccups and problems than that too. Tangent: stepping through the history of the story river can be useful for this kind of object, and I like that it can be easily and fully downloaded for private offline reading/searching/modification too. It's not meant just for the web (and its conventions); I aim to distribute however I must.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      I don't mean to criticise your work or be the typical nitpicking HN commenter that you see downvoted all the way to the bottom of the comments page. After all, it's your own digital world and you should feel you have total freedom to build it in whatever way suits you. Don't feel you have to conform to the conventions on your own private space. As for bouncing people: if the content comes from the right type of a person, I'm willing to jump through some hoops to explore what they have to say. Not everyone does, but to me, the content is its own reward for persistence. Unique, personal spaces that someone chose to share fascinate me, so I like to have a look around when I discover one, just to see what they are like. Having this fully downloadable for offline use and interaction is also brilliant. I want to be able to work with everything I have even when offline for extended periods of time, so this is also an aspect I value for whatever solution I use.
vaillancourtmax 6y ago
Pretty cool to see renewed interest in personal wikis, personal websites, and digital gardens after all these years. I remember writing my first bare HTML website in the early 2000s using Microsoft Frontpage. How times have changed! As people grow curious to create their own digital garden a claim their own space on the Internet, I found that the main blocker was getting started. They have ideas, notes, and thoughts, and they're ready to share them on the Internet, but they don't know where to get started. To reduce the barrier to entry, I created a simple digital garden template [0] along with a step-by-step tutorial to set it up [1]. More than 70 people have forked the repo to try it out. Once the first step of setting the technical part up is complete, it's easy to start sharing ideas with the rest of the world. :) [0] https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-... [1] https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/setting-up-your-own-digital-garden-with-jekyll https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/setting-up-your-own-digi...
gverrilla 6y ago
garden is such a bad name
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I think it's a perfect analogy for something that's meant to be very personal to you, grow very slowly over a long long time, and that will inevitably get organised or reshuffled as you discover that your needs or personal preferences changed.
  - cgranier 6y ago
    ... and that, when left unattended, get overrun by weeds (link rot, sec vulnerabilities, etc.)

87 points by polm23 6y ago

I have so much content in my garden now that I want to do some deep data science on it soon :D https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

asdfman123 6y ago

I think a lot of us programmers did this years ago when it was still deeply uncool. We need to bring back geocities subdomains for this purpose.

exolymph 6y ago
Next best thing: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
ketzo 6y ago
I genuinely think there's a big desire out there for an easy way to carve out a small, personalized niche of the internet, a la GeoCities/MySpace.
- tradesmanhelix 6y ago
  You're not wrong: https://neocities.org https://neocities.org

charliebrownau 6y ago

Isnt the whole point of going into the garden is to get away from Internet and tech ?

TrueDuality 6y ago

Isn't this simply talking about personal websites? They haven't gone away, a lot moved to wordpress which gives them a cookie cutter feel, but a lot of other ones are still independent and feel like they're on their own.

brudgers 6y ago
Wordpress is agribusiness that's why Wordpress sites tend toward uniformity.
superkuh 6y ago
Yes. It's a rebranding. But I've used the term before myself when trying to highlight the two classes of web that exist today. http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-02-22-1.html http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-02-22-1.html
mikestew 6y ago
They haven't gone away, a lot moved to wordpress which gives them a cookie cutter feel If you come to my WordPress site to ogle my amazing, individual, and unique web design skills, then you definitely came for the wrong reasons.
exolymph 6y ago
Of course, but doesn't "digital gardens" sound much nicer and friendlier? That's the point.
tvanantwerp 6y ago
I think it's a move away not from WordPress specifically, but the kind of structure a "blog" providers. Personal sites for so long have been: home, about, portfolio, blog. Digital gardens seem to be more along the lines of: I'm gonna dump whatever I want here in whatever style and structure I like because it's my site and you can't tell me no.
SamBam 6y ago
From the description, this is more about personal wikis or notebooks. Individual pages may get edited again and again, and nothing is necessarily in a "polished for publication" state. In exploring new notebook apps -- like Notion, which allows you to publish pages and subpages -- I've found numerous examples of people having basically their own notebooks open on the web, such as https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ https://notes.andymatuschak.org/
- 6y ago

mxmilkb 6y ago

https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

IffyBog 6y ago

I've been considering starting my own after discovering this and looking through a few not too long ago. I wouldn't have time to keep up with it as of now, but I think it would be great (and would probably serve the same mental benefits) as some form of journal. But I'm not as brave as you all, so I bet it would be best for me to have a several year delay on a "public" side of my own, personal digital garden.

Havoc 6y ago

That sorta reflects how I've been feeling about digital infrastructure lately too. Anything I can self-host is a win purely to maintain some sense of control, continuity and sanity.

jpereira 6y ago

For a bit I was running these "Personal Website Tours"[0] and had a couple of folks mentioned in this article do one! They're basically just an interview around their websites, how they maintain them, how they originated. It's fascinating seeing the different workflows people come up with, and how they intersect with their personal goals. Having your own website is an incredibly powerful tool because of the diversity of ways you can use it. It's only getting easier to do so, especially with the massive amount of static site generators available today. I do think it can get even more accessible though. I ran a lil course [1] earlier this month that aimed to provide a supportive environment for people getting started with it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXbN99LY3OCarUeXcxWeZzOelXQvVdAA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXbN99LY3OCarUeXcxWe... [1]: https://hyperlink.academy/courses/internet-homesteading/22 https://hyperlink.academy/courses/internet-homesteading/22

unicornporn 6y ago
Check this podcast out[1]. Guest speaks about their personal website (and HTML energy). EDIT: hey, your tours are absolutely awesome! [1] https://html.energy/ https://html.energy/
- jpereira 6y ago
  Thanks! I'm a big fan of html.energy. Also, I'm planning on picking up the tours again soon, so if you, or anyone else, has some suggestions for folks it'd be cool to see, let me know!

tradesmanhelix 6y ago

No affiliation (beyond being a happy user myself), but I really feel like https://neocities.org https://neocities.org is a wonderful little project that makes it easy to create one's own digital garden like this article is talking about. Much love to them and similar projects. The old web isn't gone, you just have to know where to look, which is very "old web" anyway, right? :)

twerwhhgfdhdd 6y ago

I have some varied interests - conlangs, local history, retrocomputing, music theory, etc. And a while ago, I noticed I would watch a lot of videos or browse a lot of articles about these topics, but I wasn't absorbing much. Nor was I doing anything with this knowledge. So I changed my focus - I would organize the information I was getting, write my own personal conclusions, and start digging through primary sources (and in the case of applied knowledge, actually try things out). And it worked! I feel my knowledge of things has deepened, and my interests have been rekindled. It's a lot of fun and very relaxing to do. Essential to all this is a personal wiki that I keep. I'm using Zim (https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org) which most of you are probably familiar with. I don't often publish anything there - it's just local files, for now. Never heard of "Digital Gardens" but based on the reddit group they mentioned in the article, it looks like there is an emerging community of people doing this.

bausano_michael 6y ago
What does music theory mean to you? Is there a mathematical introductory take on the topic? Can it be studied without an interest in music, but rather for appreciation of patterns? I've seen the term many times before in context I found appealing, but the wiki page talks mainly about the connection to actual music.
- twerwhhgfdhdd 6y ago
  When I talk to other musicians, most use the term "music theory" to refer to the technical side of musical composition - understanding scales, rhythmic divisions, approaches to harmony, etc. A lot of this isn't really theoretical per se, at least not in the scientific sense, and I know a nitpicky guitar teacher with a masters degree who insists it's wrong to call this 'music theory' (and I suppose he also corrects people whenever they say the new millennium started in 2000). And then there's the real 'theoretical' music theory, which does what you might expect: theorizes how music works. What is music? What makes music good? What makes a particular song 'tick'? This can get pretty abstract, and might involve some nifty math. Still not strictly scientific, though there may be some science involved. If you have a theory as to what makes good music, you're naturally going to write music that tests your theory, hence the association between music theory and compositional practice. They are technically distinct, but most musicians use the term loosely. So that's probably where you're confused. I would not recommend learning about music theory unless you're interested in actual music. Most of your time learning music theory will be spent analyzing actual music, so if you don't like it you're gonna have a bad time. And personally, the benefit of music theory for me is applying its lessons to music that I write. So if you don't even like music, I'm not sure what the appeal would be.

h0p3 6y ago

Throwing my hat in the ring: https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/

selfhoster11 6y ago
Looks great. Unfortunately it overrides the back button, which could be an issue.
- h0p3 6y ago
  Well, thank you. And, I appreciate your honesty. I would not be surprised if you already know what I think on the matter. You seem to have a strong grasp of how to do it well. I am able to navigate back on my browser, but it requires an extra step. I am not terribly competent, and I've lots of things to work on. I think the backbutton overriding is a small price to pay. I realize it may bounce some people, and that's okay too. I think my empathic interlocutors end up requiring foolish degrees of curiosity and even tolerance for far larger hiccups and problems than that too. Tangent: stepping through the history of the story river can be useful for this kind of object, and I like that it can be easily and fully downloaded for private offline reading/searching/modification too. It's not meant just for the web (and its conventions); I aim to distribute however I must.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    I don't mean to criticise your work or be the typical nitpicking HN commenter that you see downvoted all the way to the bottom of the comments page. After all, it's your own digital world and you should feel you have total freedom to build it in whatever way suits you. Don't feel you have to conform to the conventions on your own private space. As for bouncing people: if the content comes from the right type of a person, I'm willing to jump through some hoops to explore what they have to say. Not everyone does, but to me, the content is its own reward for persistence. Unique, personal spaces that someone chose to share fascinate me, so I like to have a look around when I discover one, just to see what they are like. Having this fully downloadable for offline use and interaction is also brilliant. I want to be able to work with everything I have even when offline for extended periods of time, so this is also an aspect I value for whatever solution I use.

vaillancourtmax 6y ago

Pretty cool to see renewed interest in personal wikis, personal websites, and digital gardens after all these years. I remember writing my first bare HTML website in the early 2000s using Microsoft Frontpage. How times have changed! As people grow curious to create their own digital garden a claim their own space on the Internet, I found that the main blocker was getting started. They have ideas, notes, and thoughts, and they're ready to share them on the Internet, but they don't know where to get started. To reduce the barrier to entry, I created a simple digital garden template [0] along with a step-by-step tutorial to set it up [1]. More than 70 people have forked the repo to try it out. Once the first step of setting the technical part up is complete, it's easy to start sharing ideas with the rest of the world. :) [0] https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-... [1] https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/setting-up-your-own-digital-garden-with-jekyll https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/setting-up-your-own-digi...

gverrilla 6y ago

garden is such a bad name

selfhoster11 6y ago
I think it's a perfect analogy for something that's meant to be very personal to you, grow very slowly over a long long time, and that will inevitably get organised or reshuffled as you discover that your needs or personal preferences changed.
- cgranier 6y ago
  ... and that, when left unattended, get overrun by weeds (link rot, sec vulnerabilities, etc.)