A digital garden is a collection of notes or ideas that is constantly evolving.

Instead of publishing finalized ideas in a timeline, as with a blog or news feed, a digital garden is a place where ideas can be developed over time, and inter-linked to form a network of contextually-related ideas.

Background

Tools and examples

What I use

This site is written using a combination of Obsidian.md as a local markdown editor, and built and published as a website using the Jekyll static site generator.

Obsidian offers their own service for publishing your notes directly to the web, but I chose to build my own digital garden website with Jekyll in order to maintain flexibility over how my notes are presented and integrated into the rest of my website.

This site’s layout is based on a non-digital garden theme, al-folio but was adapted to include digital garden functionality from Maxime Vaillancourt’s Jekyll digital garden theme (see Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll) – including wikilinks-style markdown links, automatic backlink detection, and mouseover preview cards for linked content.

There are several other excellent Jekyll digital garden themes, and it should be possible to build a similar site using a different static site generator such as Hugo or Gatsby (see Maggie Appleton’s list of tools for several examples).