● Commonplace Book

147 2026-07-24 note

Long before "digital gardenA digital garden is a website that grows in public instead of publishing in the finished, dated-post format of a blog. Entries get revised in place, start rough and get filled in over time, and are organized by association rather…" was a term, readers kept commonplace books: bound notebooks of quotations, observations, and excerpts copied out by hand, organized under personal headings so they could be found again later. John Locke published an indexing method for his own in 1706.

This site attemps to be a descendant of that practice, with stub pagesA problem that wiki-linked digital garden run into is figuring out what happens when you reference a note that doesn't exist on disk yet. A traditional website would 404. This site turns it into a stub instead. A stub is… and search standing in for a hand-written index.