Over winter break I took some time reflecting on my digital presence, especially during my weeklong sickness and second weeklong recovery period. (I guess I had that flu everyone had but it was rather mild, like a whole flu sped through 5 days and then disappeared except for cough for a week.) When I'm sick like that I can't use any screens, it's too much mental strain to look at bright things or listen to the gentle buzz that comes with all electronics. All lights stay off and I enjoy the silence.
In the gap between being online daily and suddenly not for a week, here's what I found myself thinking about my sites: I don't have a 'digital garden website,' like I thought I did. Rather, everything I do online is part of the garden.
When I read about digital gardens and visit them online, it seems like the gardens are self contained on a certain site: their gardens are a site of pages, ideas, notes, knowledge. I've seen a few that included other tools and methods of sharing as part of their gardens, but didn't yet think to apply to myself. (If you're unfamiliar with digital gardens I have an are.na channel you can explore to learn more.)
In 2024 I started my digital garden in Obsidian, where part of it remains and where I am building on it always, but over winter break I made a "neocities" folder. I took some time to move all the notes with site ideas into each folder and suddenly it all made more sense.
It connects in ways I didn't think about before. I realized that I have many tools in my digital garden and each explore and share a different part of my reality/understanding of the world and my place in it.
In addition to what I share via my Obsidian setup, I also craft sites on Neocities. I've recently added Bearblog and Leaflet to my garden, two online mediums that offer very different opportunities of digital expression than website making and Obsidian offer. I feel like I've collected all of the infinity stones and I can finally plot all of these plants I've gotten together in a messy pile.
When you visit a botanical garden from out of town, rarely are you there to see only one part of it. You're almost always there to see all of it: to soak in as much as you can about that area's plant life and what this natural paradise has to offer in a couple hours visit. Of course, while you're there, you'll find one or two favorite areas and plants/displays that shifted your understanding of nature.
If you were to go through the 'botanical garden' of my sites, you'd find different sorts of ideas and creativity delivered by various methods. I'm not sure you'll find much that "shifts your understanding," but I do hope people find themselves in what I share sometimes. What I find most wonderful about online journals and reading websites is finding myself in their words, and feeling less alone. I hope while you lose yourself in my garden of sites, you'll find one or two favorite areas.
In a lot of ways what I share is defined by how I share it, and I'm very interested in exploring different ways to document/share my life and perspective. This means that I don't just "make websites," I share my understanding and growth through journals, how I see the world through photos/videos (I also try to share emotions that way, not sure if it's successful), and cool things I made or found or thought about otherwise. I try to document who and how I am to understand it myself, as much as I do it to share and connect with people. Some things I prefer to share at a slower pace, others more quickly and frequently.
I've always been a 'mixed media artist,' and that's true digitally too. In many ways I see websites as online zines, even if we don't present them as serialized booklets in the same way. It's the same heart that wants to share in similar DIY-style ways.
Everyone's garden is different. My garden is always growing and it will be difficult to keep an updated manual. Generally, the garden includes:
- An area for hobby-focused websites (an attempt at placing my brains and passions in an external space to interpret my thoughts and ideas creatively). This is basically Neocities as the fairy playground area of the garden.
- An area for depositing stuff I could put on my resume, if I wanted to. It offers a variety of items that, while not a portfolio strictly, would be appropriate to share professionally as writing samples. This needs to be a writing focused place. This is my Obsidian site (though I also have a lot of private stuff I use Obsidian for).
- An area for interest-based blogging that's easier and more automated than the type of stuff I use Neocities for. Bearblog has been a great compromise where I still need to learn code and be creative to do any kind of customization, but it's easy to make updates and keep tagged archives without hand-coding things.
- An area to drop ideas and explore how they connect without much maintenance overhead. Leaflet offers more visual and automated flexibility compared to obsidian and webcrafting. It bridges a gap that neither platform offers and lets me link ideas easily.
- In keeping the mixed media spirit, I also see zines as part of my garden of expression, though it's not part of the digital garden for obvious reasons. I do sometimes try to craft webzines, but I'm still trying to figure out the right alchemy of making a really good zine-website.
- Tools for collecting and keeping things organized:
- Raindrop.io: Categorized bookmarks and links which I use instead of browser bookmarks.
- Obsidian: Markdown notes that sync between phone and computer, really easy to manage/update without a lot of fluff. And I don't need to be online to use it so it works no matter where I am. Lots of plugins so I can customize to my needs so this app serves me pretty well for both personal knowledge management and general life tracking and note taking.
- DrawNote: Note-taking mobile app that allows for more visual things if desired so I can take a lot of different kinds of notes easily in the same app. I wasn't fond of any of these features/plugins in Obsidian, and this works for me.
- are.na: Instead of doomscrolling I browse the explore page on here and add stuff to collections, then later review the collections for patterns and connections. It doesn't carry a significant purpose, just a fun way to spend my time. Often I find inspiration and prompts which spark ideas for sites and things I write online. This is also where I tend to drop images I want to keep track of but don't have anywhere else to put.
- albums/folders: I have a few albums/folders on my phone and computer designated for digital garden things. I'm pretty messy about this and just drop everything in a single folder usually.
These thoughts grew out of trying to draw/construct my site map in a garden view, and I put my digital garden as the botanic gardens, by itself, and everything else is a building or feature in a mountain town that supports my dream of a solitary existence. Pretty dramatic way of viewing my online presence, but I like it.
I always do best when I can have a little system. I'm actually very bad at tending to real plants but if I have a good notes and journal system/workflow, I will write and write and blossom into new ideas and strange stories. I feel very content when I have a good system to fall back on; when things get very stressful, that's what helps carry me through it. A good workflow for bare minimum self-care and attention can help "automate" some stuff while your brains are distracted by other things. "Automate" is in quotes because of course it's never automatic, but the system provides checkpoints and checklists to help you with the thinking bits. (Or at least that's how it works for me.)
Building the system takes a very long time, in my experience, and lots of trial and error. And it's ever-evolving, never complete. My digital garden will continue to grow! There are still some budding ideas and empty plots waiting for the right tools or workflows to emerge.
It was a pretty fun reflection to have when I was taking an unintentional unplugged break from all things digital. The obsidian site is the one that takes on the true meaning of "digital garden" as an intentional location for public learning, but it's only part what I cultivate and tend to online. I am pretty transparent about my learning process in all my online spaces.
It's interesting to me also that my desire to "decrease my presence on social media" grew into a desire to increase my presence on slower forms of creative media. I don't even know if anyone has seen all of it, but I feel fulfilled in creating and sharing it.