Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.
It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites "should be.” It's an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.
digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
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. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you're hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar's Number. It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
Joel focused on the process of digital gardening, emphasising the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public. Instead of slapping Fully Formed Opinions up on the web and never changing them.
However, many of these no-code tools still feel like cookie-cutter solutions. Rather than allowing people to design the information architecture and spatial layouts of their gardens, they inevitably force people into pre-made arrangements. This doesn't meant they don't "count,” as "real” gardens, but simply that they limit their gardeners to some extent. You can't design different types of links, novel features, experimental layouts, or custom architecture. They're pre-fab houses instead of raw building materials.
Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.
This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.
Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.
Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
The isn't how we usually think about writing on the web. Over the last decade, we've moved away from casual live journal entries and formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it's done, it's done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to the printer.
This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points of the web. Gardens lean into this – there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.
You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen.
It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow.
It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you.
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
Putting anything imperfect and half-written on an "official website” may feel strange. We seem to reserve all our imperfect declarations and poorly-worded announcements for platforms that other people own and control. We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. Blogging evolved in the Premium Mediocre culture of Millenialism as a way to Promote Your Personal Brand™ and market your SEO-optimized Content.
Weird, quirky personal blogs of the early 2000's turned into cleanly crafted brands with publishing strategies and media campaigns. Everyone now has a modern minimalist logo and an LLC.
Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
If you give it a bit of forethought, you can build your garden in a way that makes it easy to transfer and adapt. Platforms and technologies will inevitably change. Using old-school, reliable, and widely used web native formats like HTML/CSS is a safe bet. Backing up your notes as flat markdown files won't hurt either.
Niche Internet