● Digital Garden

265 2026-07-24 note

A 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 than chronology. This site is one, in the same family as the older commonplace bookLong before "digital garden" 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… tradition and the note-linking discipline of a ZettelkastenNiklas Luhmann kept a slip-box of roughly 90,000 index cards over his working life, each one a single idea, each one cross-referenced to others by hand-written note numbers. He credited it, half-jokingly, with most of his output as a sociologist.….

Gardens link inward to their own other entries. Every dead link is an invitation to plant something new.

See Static Site GeneratorsA static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital garden that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.… for why 11ty specifically, and 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… for the mechanism that keeps the garden's edges from ever going dead.