# Digital gardens

Date: 2020-06-04 21:32:23 +08:00Date modified: 2021-07-25 23:21:23 +08:00

An environment for crafting Evergreen notes. Unlike a traditional blog where it concerns the final output, a digital garden cares more on the process of creating notes even if it's incomplete.

A list of examples...

- One of the more popular one especially with the relatively recent note-taking craze with Zettelkasten, Andy Matuschak's notes have always been referred to especially with the navigation of notes by stacking them horizontally. It is nice to navigate representing your curiosity as most note-taking system sucks at providing navigation.

- Maggie Appleton's is a simple one with some metadata for completion, when it was first created and updated.

- Gwern Branwen's website is an aesthetically nice website with the pop-ups at hover. They also address concerns of seeing changes by explicitly listing them in a dedicated page. Similarly, their posts also has attached meaningful metadata with their confidence, completion status, and backlinks.

In other words, wikis with a fancier name and a gardening metaphor.

However, it does come with a different mindset. The culture emphasizes to Start small and improve later, just like how you tend your own garden. It focuses on the growth of your notes to the point of naming the states of progress. First, your notes will start as a seedling, then grow as you develop more insight, it will turn into a budding note, and eventually develop into an evergreen note.

Digital gardens also makes an additional point on creating a web thoughts, making them Non-linear notes with associations.

While digital gardens are essentially glorified personal knowledge bases, digital gardens are usually seen with the following features.

- An interface focusing on freely referencing other notes. Usually, this comes in the form of Backlinks.

- Composes of different notes of different maturity level: either an incomplete seedling of a note, a partially complete note, or a fully-developed evergreen note.

- Attaching meaningful File metadata to enable further tracking the status of your notes.

- Sports a note-taking workflow along with a publication workflow (e.g., web, PDf documents), encouraging to work in the open.

## Backlinks

- Note-taking
- Personal information management
- Roam Research