About this garden

Hello and welcome! You have landed in the digital garden section of my personal website, created with the purpose of saving all the interesting things I come across in the Internet, and hopefully, with a little of maintenance, see if some connections, patterns, or topics emerge, and note those down.

It is organized like so: on top I have the interesting things (articles, videos, etc.) that I would like to share and also keep a bookmark on. I nicknamed it “Open Tabs” because the idea is for it to reduce the number of open tabs in my browser(s) without losing sight of the interesting content; on that same line of thought, the idea is to include some short text highlighting what caught my eye, because it has happened to me before that I keep some page open in my browser because I think it’s interesting, and then go back to it after some time having completely forgotten which part I found interesting 😅.

Below I have the longer notes, intended to expand on any topic that I find interesting. The idea is to implement something close to what is showcased in the original post about digital gardening, The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral, i.e. use the longer notes to connect the dots and sort of think aloud about a topic in particular. As such, they are less like blog posts and more like constantly-evolving notes or mini essays (I might eventually steal the idea of “growth stages” from Maggie Appleton’s digital garden).

And last, right beside the longer notes, I have a collection of reposts of other content, short status updates and other miscellaneous content, nicknamed “the Stream” (stealing again from the original digital gardening essay). The difference between this section and the Open Tabs is that the latter is intended to add to my personal knowledge database and to be referenced by the longer notes, while the Stream is simply things I have liked or found funny or amusing; it would be the ideal place for pictures I like, memes or my favorite song of the moment.

As of the date of last update of this note, these sections are implemented as follows: the longer notes are maintained through Obsidian, just like the original instructions for the template I used as a starting point, while the links in the Open Tabs section are regular Jekyll posts on a separate collection that I also maintain through Obsidian.

As for the Stream, it is a bit more complicated: since it is mostly composed of reactions to content I find elsewhere, in the form of posts of different types, I wanted an interface that already knew about those post types and was accessible from different devices. For the time being, Sparkles fits the bill (and has an amazing interface that I like very much :D), so I’m using it on all my devices; you can check more details in Using Sparkles to post across devices. Since Sparkles is a Micropub client, it needs a server counterpart, for which I’m using my own installation of IndieKit that generates Jekyll posts, mapping the different post types into Jekyll categories.
(I have also installed the jekyll-compose Rubygem, which allows me to create Jekyll posts locally without having to go through the server, but so far it doesn’t generate quite the same format as when going through Micropub, so I’m considering writing a small Ruby script – or even a Jekyll plugin – to generate the posts locally in the right format.)