I’ve neglected a blog over the years, often due to not having anything significant to write. Mostly, I’ve used it to document step-by-step guides of various tinkerings that I feel may be of use to someone, most likely future me.
In My quest to find a suitable note taking system, I discovered digital gardens. These are less diary entries, more curated miscellania letting people express their true selves. Instead of being “a design blog” or “a recipe site”, it may be a website with recipes, art, parenting and whatever seeds the “gardener” feels like planting.
Notable digital gardens* all seem to give a nod to Amy Hoy’s 2017 piece How the Blog Broke the Web. This article explains how the ease of creating blog updates in dedicated CMS software meant people gave up on their self-maintained, labour-of-love sites. When the emphasis moved towards frequent updates, things moved from pruning and honing published thoughts to generating new content, because that’s what everyone else is doing, right?
Digital gardens are a modern take on the personal sites of the 90s and early 2000s. Internet rabbit holes you can get lost down . It’s something I can nurture over time - I can use it for thinking, a knowledge base, a portfolio. The key thing is, it’s a constant work in progress - I don’t feel I need to get it perfect like a blog post. Hopefully that’ll lead to more writing!
Further reading on digital gardens that inspired me to create one: