#status/processed  # Metadata Author:: [[Maggie Appleton]] Title:: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden Full Title:: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden Import Date:: 2023-05-13 Source:: #source/readwise/reader Source URL:: [Source URL](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history) Review URL:: [Review URL](https://readwise.io/bookreview/27440795) Public URL:: [Public URL](https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01gzvcae29wsj70a42phc00m5a) Newsletter:: [[Digital gardens, Parenting, and Coffee]] Tags:: [[Priority]] [[Digital Gardening]] # Highlights - Caufield makes clear 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. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxyt8c5yvxvyxnsry65m1jv) - 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.** - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxyvw1345vjjm43d25sjbtm) - Instead of slapping [[Fully Formed Opinions]] up on the web and never changing them. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxyxqgxcajf8pm7tn14kkrq) - Amy argues that Moveable Type didn't just launch us into the "**[[Chronological Sort Era]]**". It also killed the wild, diverse, hodge-podge personalisation of websites that characterised the early web. ==Instead of hand-coding your own layout and deciding exactly how to arrange the digital furniture==, we began to enter the age of standardised layouts - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxyyrxpeyp6bt0xwzegwf4m) - These services are trying to find a happy middle ground between tediously hand-coding solutions, and being trapped in the restrictions of Wordpress or Squarespace. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxz19495pffwtd8ef8qxgxx) - 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 - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxz43hvc298xsvha4rmwdq1) - ==In performance-blog-land you do that thinking and researching privately, then shove it out at the final moment. A grand flourish that hides the process.== - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxz5ar1ttv1a8nf9fe5dkz4) - We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxz6w9a8qd815a8etfmn3vm) - Publishing imperfect and early ideas **==requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers.**== - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxz9841d6cfx6pv1gzg7bh7) - They ask the reader to allow the writer to be wrong, offer constructive criticism, and attribute their work - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxzk9wh33d4j5crsd4jv8sh) - Gardens are a chance to question the established norms of a '_personal website_', and make space for weirder, wilder experiments. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxzmm45bdtsfeys0ccaeyqa) - Gardens offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren't cookie cutter profiles. They're the higher-fidelity version, complete with quirks, contradictions, and complexity. - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxzn98jbbvkxe63v5b5xq7x) - the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. _But_ there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that. ==It's hard to say what kind of libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but it certainly isn't going to happen behind a Medium paywall.== - Date:: [[2023-05-08]] - Find: [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gzxzqvxh5r0y7ww3tvrs75n3) - Tags: [[Multiplayer Digital Gardening]]