How this garden works

Most personal sites are blogs. Reverse-chronological lists of finished posts, each one implicitly claiming to be done. I've had many blogs. That format never worked for how I think. Ideas don't arrive fully formed. They start rough, get revisited, connect to other ideas over time, sometimes get abandoned entirely.

And my hobbies come and go, usually cycling through them over time.

So this is my digital garden instead.

Maggie Appleton describes a digital garden as "a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time." I like her framing. The notes here are loose and unopinionated. Many of them are about things I don't entirely understand yet. That's the point. This is a place of synthesis.

How to find things

The homepage shows my most recently updated thoughts. Whatever I'm actively chewing on floats to the top. There's no archive, no chronological feed. If something isn't reachable from the homepage, it's either stale or not connected enough to surface yet.

From recent notes, you follow links. Notes connect to other notes, and you swim downstream through ideas rather than browse a catalog. A river, not a library.

Growth stages

Notes aren't "published" or "draft." They grow.

• 🌱 Seedling: just planted. Likely wrong, incomplete, or half-formed.
• 🌿 Growing: I've come back to tend this. Taking shape but still evolving.
• 🌲 Evergreen: I'm confident in this one. Revised, tested, or proven useful over time.

Nothing is permanent. Evergreen notes still get updated. Seedlings get composted.

The tech

Built with smelt, a static site generator I wrote in Go. Notes are markdown files with TOML frontmatter. About a thousand lines of code. No frameworks, no JavaScript. Hosted on a cheap VPS behind nginx.

After all, this is just for fun.