My blog is dead. Long live my digital garden

I don’t recall how or why I ended up there, but a month ago I stumbled across Joel Hook’ website where I was introduced to the concept of a digital garden. I was immediately captivated by the idea and went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading posts on digital gardens and looking at other people’s digital gardens. Here are the links I found most useful (apart from Joel’s original post):

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton.
• How to set up your own digital garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
• Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang.
• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy.

I think the main thing holding me back from publishing more frequently is perfectionism, overthinking, and fear of being judged harshly. It is my hope that after adopting the mindset of treating this site as a digital garden rather than a blog of finished and polished posts, I can drop some of those mental blocks.

I already write in a personal digital garden of sorts - my own notes vault in Obsidian. I quickly became obsessed with the idea of creating a website built from the content in an Obsidian vault. I had been wanting to drop the Ghost dependency from my blog for a while, as I just wasn’t finding it all that useful. I decided to try and build a Gatsby site, generated from the markdown files in Obsidian.

And so I’ve spent the last month’s writing time dedicated to re-writing this site pretty much from the ground-up. Choosing to do this rather than just fork something someone else had already made and shared on GitHub was probably a mistake, but here we are.

Possibly my favourite part of dropping the idea that I am writing a “blog post” is that I feel that blog posts should have some sort of conclusion paragraph. I have always sucked at writing conclusions. I recall it being the absolute hardest part when writing essays and assignments for my Business degree, and the lecturer would usually leave feedback like “weak conclusion”. Savage 😂. Perhaps that’s why I bristle at writing them now. A blog should have a conclusion. A note can just end.