What do you think of digital gardens?
I have had a hard time starting and keeping a personal blog. I'll do it for a few weeks and then not touch it for a month or two. Today, I came across this post about maintaining a digital garden. The tl;dr basically the idea is to get away from dated blog posts and instead focus on maintaining your web pages like a garden.
I am curious to know what you think about this topic. My main concern would be around how you build an audience if you aren't putting out "new" posts all the time.
Please share your thoughts below!
One of the points in the article you link to is that your site can have more than one way of presenting the content, not just the conventional blog list ordered by date. I have for example a list of "Most popular posts" on my home page (although a more accurate description would be "Featured posts" or "My favourite posts" because it is a manually maintained list), along with a link to Posts which sorts them all by date, and within a post there are links to list other posts with the same Tags and Categories.
Extending the "digital garden" metaphor, I also say on my About page: "If my personal website was a 'digital garden', it would be more of a functional vegetable patch than an ornamental floral garden." :-)
I like this idea, never thought about maintaining a website/blog like a garden, but it's the perfect analogy.
Takes the pressure off of creating the "perfect" website/blog at the start, and allows room for improvement.
@rosiesherry has built an entire playbook around this concept.
... but, the fundamental nature of it is simply capturing data for your community.
if you call that a "garden" that's cool!
... but, it's an important feature.
... content is the reason folks usually show up... at first. creating content is one of the best ways to start. there are many other ways, but, they aren't as useful (or they don't grow as fast or have the potential for fast growth).
Cool, thanks for letting me know
I love my little garden. But I don't use it to build an audience - I use it to think through difficult problems and improve my thinking over time. Sort of like a public, personal wiki.
In fact, the absence of an audience-building pressure is exactly what I like most about the concept. I'm generally not writing with a target demographic in mind - I'm writing to improve my thinking. So I don't need to add as much polish, hooks, CTAs, etc etc. It's just pure thought, structure, connection.
Though everyone's use-cases / motivations are different, I'm sure.
What are your reasons for making that public vs keeping those thoughts private then?
That makes sense. Thanks for sharing.