On Digital Gardens
I first came across the concept of a digital garden while searching for alternatives to Notion, which led me to Obsidian. A big part of what drew me in was ownership. Because everything is just locally-stored markdown files, I am not tied to a platform. There is no risk of losing access or being locked into a specific tool.
As I explored Obsidian, I noticed people were using it for far more than just note-taking. That’s when I encountered the idea of a knowledge management system, or digital garden: personal, evolving networks of linked notes that grow over time.
A digital garden embraces iteration. Notes can be messy, incomplete, or constantly evolving. You plant ideas, revisit them, refine them, and link them together as your understanding deepens.
On this site, I use little leaf icons to show different stages of development. A “seedling” is just a quick idea, “budding” is something more developed, and “evergreen” is a more complete article.
For me, the idea of a knowledge management system was especially appealing because I have a lot of different interests and hobbies, some related and many not. Before this, everything lived in separate places or just in my head. Creating a digital garden gave me a way to try and consolidate all of that into one place.
One of the more practical reasons I built it was to track my hikes, bike rides, and mountaineering trips. I just got back from a long bikepacking trip across West Africa and was trying to think of a good way to document my trip: where I went, how far it was, what I experienced along the way. I wanted to write about it in my Obsidian vault but also share the GPX data from my bike computer as a map. And that’s how the idea of a routes page started.
On a technical side, I moved my website off of Gatsby and rebuilt it from scratch with Astro. Astro made it easy to treat content as a first-class citizen while still giving me full control over the frontend when I need it. My site is essentially just a structured view of my Obsidian vault. Even the interactive maps are reusable, and I’ve already used it to create maps for my previous bikepacking trips.
Anyway, that’s the general idea. I should probably get back to things I’m supposed to be focusing on now instead of redoing my website for the millionth time.