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.
Instead of publishing polished, final pieces of writing, 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. At least ideally. I’ll see how it plays out.
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 more technical site, 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.