Rethinking My Blog

Gardening or just zettels

I am now reconsidering if a digital garden where existing posts are continuously refined is the best way to capture my thoughts.

One thing that I think is lost if I update existing posts is how my thought process progresses from point A to point B. So chronological order is important here, unlike what Digital Gardens prescribes.

I’m aligned with the rest of the idea of a digital garden, where it is:

• Topic Oriented
• The structure is networked
• Does not shy away from “seedlings” or very raw thoughts

For example, Storyflow mentioned the following:

notes stay in progress by design

Maggie Appleton’s evergreen essay mentioned as such:

In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the open internet. You post ideas while they’re still “seedlings,” and tend them regularly until they’re fully grown, respectable opinions

Granted, I’m using git, and all my changes are preserved there. But I’m seeing some value with leaving a trail on how my thoughts progress.

Tying the separate small raw or polished notes together would be key though, and I’m thinking of using two things:

• Using bi-directional links to tie things together
• Using tags to denote the type of post it is.

In the “Digital Garden”, it’ll be like a seedling, budding, or evergreen.

I think some of those terms would still fit in, it’s just that, rather than updating an existing post, I would end up with a bunch of seedlings scattered here and there, and eventually I might come up with a much more structured post that would either summarize or expound on a topic.

With that, I would end up with two types of posts instead: one raw, and another an essay.

There could be newer raw posts than the essay, and that is just fine, it’s just that the essay should somehow be much more prominent without changing the chronological order. I’m thinking of having larger fonts, padding, or color. Something that would either take more real estate or colors that would catch the reader’s attention.

But wait, where does this fit in the Garden and the Stream, is this more of a Stream than a Garden?

Maybe so. Maybe not?

I love how I utilize bi-directional links in both Obsidian and Logseq. I would love to have that in my “blog”.

I would love to have a bunch of topics presented on my website, ordered based on which topic got linked the most + which topic was linked recently.

I’m imagining a system where I would highlight the essay when exploring a specific topic, but leave the connected raw posts in chronological order.

What Next

In any case, I have to figure out if there’s some way to do bi-directional links out-of-the box in Hugo. I guess that’ll be the next thing I do, while I re-organize my blog as I go.

References

• Maggie Appleton
• Storyflow
• Garden and the Stream