What is a digital garden?

I have always loved pruning my digital footprint. Deleting old posts feels just as satisfying as pulling weeds in a garden. However, I always felt that it was wrong, as if I wasn’t supposed to delete it from my digital history. It always seemed like there was an expectation that once you published content, it had to be perfect, and you were meant to walk away and let it exist forever. It wasn’t until I recently came across an article on creating a digital garden that I gave myself the freedom to say, “This space is not finished, my content does not need to be perfect, and I have permission to let it grow and change slowly over time.”

The idea of the digital garden can be summarized as follows: 

Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. – https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history/

The process of digital gardening emphasizes the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public. https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history/

With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience. With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time. – https://timrodenbroeker.de/digital-garden/

To be honest, I struggle with the last quote. But I think it speaks to the ever-present artist paradox. To be an artist is to express what is within with the hopes that it will also resonate with those outside yourself. So here I am talking to myself, but I’m also talking to you. I want to share what I am learning and what I am thinking, as both an exercise in service to others and a means of processing and analyzing my thoughts. My work, products, and content in this digital garden will be evaluated based on how they resonate with you.

I don’t think many creatives fit nicely into a small box, and I surely never have. At this moment, I am going to embrace that my projects are exceptionally diverse, and I look forward to seeing what resonates with you. Because aren’t we all a bit of a wildflower patch? 

Here are some WordPress plugins that I plan to utilize to help build the interconnectivity of my digital wildflower garden:

• Tags are topical and freeform, auto-linked by TaxoPress
• Making use of the GenerateBlocks plugin, which has a great replacement for the core Query Loop block with the ability to customize the query just like you can in code with WP_Query
• Breadcrumbs via Breadcrumb NavXT
• Redirection to monitor permalink changes so I can easily reorganize things without breaking links.
• Webmentions as an addition to pingbacks and trackbacks for the indieweb.
• Post Modified Time Block for easily displaying the post modified date on a page
• Bookmark Card for nice looking bookmark cards
• Child Pages Card for displaying child pages in the sidebar