I stumbled upon the Digital Garden concept on HN recently when the Joel Hooks “My blog is a digital garden, not a blog” post ranked in the home page.
That’s how I got in touch with the term and the idea.
This website is many things: it’s a collection of tutorials, it’s the place where you can get my free books, it’s the thing I curate every day.
Having an analog garden too, in other words a garden in the real world, it’s the same - you need to take care of it constantly if you want it to be beautiful and nice.
I call my site a blog, but this just refers to the reverse chronological order of the homepage list of posts.
Otherwise it’s more like my personal publishing platform, but the name is boring. Digital Garden sounds cooler.
It’s not a traditional blog. For example, all blogs have comments. I don’t have comments, I never had them. I want to remove all the friction in publishing and I do not have the bandwidth to moderate and engage in discussions related to my blog posts.
My blog posts are not peer-reviewed, and many times I publish a 100 words blog post and I do not care if all the other blogs in my niche, call them competitors if you want, publish 5.000 words minimum. I don’t care.
Sometimes I write things like this post, just reflections, work in progress thoughts.
I also don’t do boring keyword research to find posts that might be popular, I just write what I want to write.
I have a home page with all my latest posts in reverse chronological order, but I think it’s useless. We have RSS readers for that. Sure, having maybe 7 or 10 latest posts is cool, but 300 like I do now? I don’t know.
Most of the things I publish here are how-to instructions on how I solved a bug, or how I implemented a particular feature, or the notes on the things I learned.
I don’t have another good term for my website. “Website”, sure, is a term. But a boring one. Publication? Even more boring. And I’m not Wired or freeCodeCamp, it’s just me.
This is my Digital Garden, the place where I grow all the things I’m interested in, I talk about what I’m interested in, and where I grow myself.