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What is a “digital garden?”

I encountered the idea of a “digital garden” Friday and was instantly enthusiastic and spent some time this weekend nerding out about it. Here is the result – the beginning of my digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

A digital garden is a personal website curated by its author, with essays and information about the subject or subjects they’re excited about. Some are wide-ranging and complex and cover a variety of subjects, while others cover a single subject, such as neurology or books,

Here’s a directory of digital gardens. It’s a digital garden of digital gardens!

Digital gardens provide an alternative to chronological streams such as blogs and social media. Streams are great for finding out what’s happening and whats new now. But they’re lousy for organizing information. Also, streams are terrible for longevity. Once stuff gets pushed down off the top of the stream, it disappears. Digital gardens are places where you can organize information and keeping information available over the long term.

Digital gardens can be very simple, just an index page or a Google Doc. Or you can use sophisticated software to create complex, Wikipedia-like documents.

After a while thinking about this idea, I realized that we’re talking here about the old, 90s “personal website.” People back then would create websites devoted to their favorite bands, or hobbies, or just their own lives and interests. Eventually these got swallowed up by Wikipedia, Google and the various social media silos.

Digital gardens are an extension of, and renaming of, personal websites. That doesn’t make the idea less powerful though.

Digital gardens are exciting to me, personally, because they solve a couple of problems that I’ve been noodling about for years. One problem is that I post a lot of stuff to my streams. Some days I post a dozen or two dozen items. Most are ephemeral – links to breaking news articles, some with comments, some without. Wisecracks. Memes. Old ads and photos from the mid-20th Century.

But some of what I post seems like it should be more long-lasting, whether it’s a book review or the journal of our 25th anniversary safari to Africa last year.

A digital garden solves that problem. I can just put up an index page of links to long-lived and notable content, and let that — rather than the blog or my biography — be my home page. I’ll continue with the blog and keep the bio. But the index page will be the main entrance to my site.

Again, this is not a new idea. Gina Trapani has been doing that a few years, and I don’t think she would say her idea is particularly original to her. But it’s still a great idea — and it’s new to me.

The second problem that digital gardens solve for me is that I’ve been noodling about ideas for projects for, well, several years now. Interviews with people I find interesting, software reviews and how-tos. Occasionally I have even acted on these ideas. But I don’t do it often because I don’t have a permanent home for them.

Resources

My digital garden: mitchwagner.com.

Here’s the article that got me excited, and introduced the idea of “digital gardening” to me: Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

How the blog broke the web – Amy Hoy provides a brief history of blogs and social media, and discusses why they’re not great ways to organize information.

Hoy says there were only 23 blogs in 1999? Amazing. By late 2001 there seemed like a million of them.

Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden – Apparently the term and idea has been around in various forms for more than 20 years. Not surprising. The internet is a tangled web. Streams and search engines are two great ways to find stuff, but stuff can still be hard to find. That’s not a new problem.

Maggie Appleton’s directory of digital gardeners and digital gardening tools

Maggie’s Digital Garden

Maggie again: A brief overview of digital gardens as a Twitter thread.

A list of artificial brain networked notebook apps – These include a couple of familiar names to me, such as Roam Research and Obsidian. They seem to be a mix of private note-taking apps, Internet publishing tools, and private apps that can also publish to the public web.

This is a take on “digital gardens” that borrows from the philosophy of “zettelkasten.” Put simply, a zettelkasten is a system of note-taking where you write down each idea separately — in its original vision decades ago, you wrote each idea on a slip of paper or index card, though now of course there are digital versions — and then link madly between related notes. Ideas can come from books, articles, thinking, observations, whatever. Zettelkasten advocates say they can come up with fresh insights simply by returning to their zettel and following the links. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who invented the idea, credited his zettelkasten as a collaborator on many papers and books.

You don’t have to use dedicated software for a digital garden. Mine is just an index page for my existing blog.

Second Brain – “A curated list of awesome “Public Zettelkastens 🗄️ / Second Brains 🧠 / Digital Gardens 🌱”

Digital Gardens – Another explainer with a couple of examples. The author says:

In basic terms, [a digital garden] is a different format for written content on the web. It’s about moving away from blog posts ordered by dates and categories, into more of an interlinked web of notes.

One of the main ingredients is bi-directional links between those notes, creating a network of notes, similar to Wikipedia.

I would not say that the notes have to be interlinked, Wikipedia-style. Though they can be.

gwern.net – A very nice example of a digital garden covering a broad range of subjects.

Article: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks.

Our Africa journal – Saying goodbye to a new friend

June 23, 2019 — Yesterday, we left the camp for our next stop. Festus drove us two hours over those rough desert roads to the same airstrip we’d flown in to. We arrived 40 minutes early so we had time to spend with our new friend. We sat in the same shelter where we’d had our first lunch together three days earlier, and talked.

Festus told us how he found his way when guiding people through through the bush. I thought maybe he’d memorized the features, the trees and rocks and hills and such, like Mark Twain memorized the Mississippi River. He said no, those things change, but the desert is surrounded by mountains and he looked for the relative position of the peaks to figure out where he is. I was reminded of how I found my way around by car when we lived in Boston; the Prudential and Hancock skyscrapers towered over the skyline and were visible miles around. I looked for those two towers and their positions relative to each other and that gave me a first approximation of my position and whether I was moving in the right direction.

The airstrip was just a cleared stretch of flat ground with a few sheds at one end of it, where we sat. The only other people were a young Himba man, wearing Western clothes, who worked as a sort of attendant, along with two of his buddies, keeping him company. I was reminded of a rural gas station in upstate New York that I visited for two minutes to get driving directions one night years ago when I got lost on the way to visit a friend. I thought at the time that I blew through that town in less the five minutes but those three friends had probably been at that gas station for years.

In addition to the three Himba men, the only other denizens of the airstrip were two emaciated, medium-sized dogs who walked slowly through. They didn’t belong to anyone; they were just passing. They came to the door of the restroom and watched with sad eyes while I did my business in there. I am usually leery of off-leash dogs but pair looked so sad I just wanted to give them a bath, take them home, feed them a nice supper of boiled chicken and rice, and then curl up on the couch and watch TV together. One of the Himba men attempted to chase the dogs off by throwing pebbles and shouting at them. The dogs looked like they had been ready to move on anyway. Three more dogs, equally skinny, forlorn and slow moving, came through a few minutes later.

We had a surprisingly moving goodbye with Festus, considering we’d only been together three days. Festus gave me a warm triple handclasp with both hands and looked me in the eye, a traditional greeting he’d taught us. I’m afraid I rushed it; Julie pointed out to me later that I’m just not an emotionally demonstrative person, other than with her. I’m working on that. I hope Festus will remember our conversations and my sincere respect and affection for him, and that he will forget my hurried goodbye.

And we got on the small plane to our next stop, which was actually two flights, one more than an hour to Swakopmund, a small city founded by Germans for mining and other industry, and then we switched planes while the first refueled, to go more than another hour to our current destination, Sossusvlei. Our planes on both legs were Cessna C210s, with two passenger seats for me and Julie, the only passengers, and a couple more seats temporarily removed for our luggage.

I’m getting to quite like small planes. The ride is more interesting, even if it is more likely to be scary sometimes. You chat with the pilot. They give the safety and orientation talk personally and always include the same joke: They show us the airsickness bag and tell us if we use it we should not return it; instead, keep it “as a souvenir” of the airline. For our our first leg, to Soussesvlei, I did the joke before the pilot did. He was chagrined; I’d stepped on his laugh line!

During our brief layover in Swakopmund, the airline parked us inside a small waiting room in a hangar. It was a bit of a transition after our time in the bush, a proper modern waiting room with a sign with the WiFi password. This was my first access to good WiFi in a week and I slurped up email and reviewed it on the plane. I had left an out-of-office message that said I would be out all June and NOT reading email, even when I get back, so anyone who needs anything should email my colleagues or message me again in early July. I am adhering to the spirit of that message; I only plan to read a few messages when I return. The only reason I’m even checking email is to see if anything cataclysmic or wonderful happens. So far there’s been neither, just work and my friends and family rolling on without me. Similarly, I glance at news headlines every few days and am surprised by how inconsequential it all is.

On the leg from Swakopmond to Soussevlei, we had a scenic flight, and the pilot pointed out landmarks from the air, including salt processing fields, two shipwrecks, one of which is now deep inland as the desert advances over the century since that disaster, and the dunes of Soussuslei.

Sossusvlei is a big, dry hot desert. Every time I say someplace in Africa is pretty dry and hot and desolate, we go someplace even more dry and hot and desolate. Geology is Sossusvlei’s big draw, including miles and miles of sand dunes, stretching up to hundreds of feed tall. Like our two previous destinations, Soussusvlei is blistering hot by day, even now, in African winter, though it gets cold at night. It can get up to 50 degrees C in summer.

🌍📓

In “Man of Steel” there’s a scene at the end where Superman and the big villain are having a fight flying around midtown Manhatttan, and they’re ripping apart skyscrapers and you see these shots of Superman and the villain getting thrown through a floor of cubicles and sending partitions and desks and office furniture flying.

And I kept thinking that there’s probably some poor bastard who finally got his cubicle JUST RIGHT — just the right desk chair, keyboard tray at the perfect height, little potted cactus, couple of inspirational posters, tiny corkboard in the perfect spot, two-cup USB-powered teakettle. And now it’s all smashed up. 🍿

The house 🎃 across the street ☠ is starting 👻 to decorate 🧛‍♀️ for Halloween. 🧙 Too soon!🦇

“Digital gardens” are personal spaces on the Internet that avoid the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media. They’re not ephemeral and stream-of-consciousness, like blogs or social media. They’re curated (to use an overused word) websites about the creator’s interests and passions: Museums, books, philosophy, politics, etc. More permanent than either blogs or social media.

This is extremely intriguing to me.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/0…

And here’s why they’re called “digital gardens:” My blog is a digital garden, not a blog joelhooks.com/digital-g…

You don’t have to use fancypants technology. This guy’s digital garden is just a Google Doc. docs.google.com/document/…

This is very much in the IndieWeb spirit.

Like I said about 10 hours ago, I thought I had insomnia licked because I got a good night’s sleep five nights in a row, but last night it was back and I got about three hours of sleep total.

I was pleased, however, because I got myself set up so I can work on my iPad in the living room until I’m tired.

Insomnia is no longer an occasional thing for me. It’s a lifestyle.

“I’ve got this insomnia thing licked,” I said. “I’ve slept well six nights in a row,” I said.

Note the timestamp on this post.

Oh, well, at least I got work done — good progress on an article I’ve been stuck on for a month or more.

I’ve learned that my resting face when I’m a zoom call looks like I’m drunk. Once I have my colleagues trained that I’m not drunk, I can start day-drinking.

If you want to see women walking while talking on the phone, most with dogs, some pushing strollers, get out of your house and walk around the neighborhood at 7 am.

I dropped a container of imported parmesan cheese flakes on the floor the other day and swept it up and put it back in the container and now the dog gets a little cheese with her food. She’s asking to see the wine list too.

I stopped briefly on my walk yesterday to fiddle with my iPhone, and this beautiful cat came out from behind some bushes to say hello. After pausing a moment to make sure I wasn’t going to do anything violent, she flopped at my feet. 📷

Epic Games' assertion that there's an iPhone market that Apple monopolizes, distinct from the smartphone market that includes Android, looks like bullshit to me.

Apple kicked Epic’s Fortnite out of the App Store for terms of service violations. Fortnite immediately sued.

Thomas Claburn at The Register:

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, filed a lawsuit against Apple on Thursday accusing the iGiant of illegally monopolizing iOS app distribution and app payments.

The game biz earlier in the day announced a promotional initiative called Fortnite Mega Drop to allow Fortnite players to purchase in-game virtual currency and in-game items directly from Epic, at a price 20 per cent below their iOS App Store in-app purchase price.

In doing so, Epic violated Section 3.11 of Apple’s App Store Guidelines, which states that iOS developers must use Apple’s payment mechanism.

If you start reading a book and it’s not grabbing you, how long do you give it until you give up? Or do you always read through to the end once you start?

Facebook is refusing to remove a doctored Nancy Pelosi video. Factcheckers put ‘partly false’ label on video that has been circulating since Thursday and viewed more than 2m times www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…

Trump has had more nice things to say about a woman arrested for sex trafficking than he has about John Lewis.

How to spell “entrepreneur:” It’s got more Rs than you think.

Mirrors only became commonplace and inexpensive in the 19th Century. Until then, almost everybody had no idea what they looked like. They had never seen images of themselves.

Pessimists Archive: Mirrors

I saw this regal gentleman at Lake Murray. 📷

Drive-through communion at the church up the street from us. 📷

Communion was no longer running when I saw the sign while out walking yesterday. That’s a good thing because I would have hopped in my car, driven up and asked for a grilled cheese burrito and chalupa supreme with a pineapple twist freeze and then I would have gone straight to hell.

The church is Baptist but often hosts other denominations.

Too often I try to get just a couple more shaves out of an old blade. That’s a metaphor for something.

The good: I shaved with a new blade this morning and I’m wearing a new shirt.

The bad: I have a razor burn on my left cheek from the last time I shaved, and a blemish on my philtrum.

I resolved on Thursday to do less Facebook, because Facebook doesn’t make me feel good. I was on Facebook this weekend more than I would’ve liked, during which time I learned about three friends going through big life events.

Doing less Facebook is not easy. People who never joined made the right choice.

I’m unfollowing a lot of people I don’t feel strongly about, and leaving groups. I’m there to get updates from friends and family. That’s all.

Vacation photo, Borrego Springs, California, 2013 📷

A photo essay of classic Japanese movie monsters.

Where Western movies used animated clay figures, the Japanese used men in costumes on miniature cityscapes. Some of those cityscapes were elaborate and beautiful.

Godzilla is drawn from Japan’s lived experience at the receiving end of a nuclear bomb attack. The texture of his skin is based on the scars carried by Hiroshima survivors. Godzilla is also based on the Shinto god of destruction, “which Godzilla B-movie maker Shogo Tomiyama says operates not in service of humankind, but rather the laws of nature. ‘He totally destroys everything and then there is a rebirth,’ he says, ‘Something new and fresh can begin.” Godzilla isn’t good or bad. It just exists.

“Aggravation is an art form in his hands.” RIP Regis, my friend and companion on many a business travel hotel room morning in the 90s and 2000s.

I have an idea for a movie. An action-comedy about two cops who are partners and best friends and who bicker a lot. They are out to take down a wealthy drug dealer. There are car chases and gunfights. Their captain shouts at them.

We watched Bad Boys tonight, which we had never seen. It was the least enjoyable film I have watched all the way through.

This is a good look for me. In no way does it make me look threatening or mentally unbalanced. 📷

More than half the people born in 1980 are over 40. My brain cannot process this information.

David Roth at The New Yorker: How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat: Verhoeven’ s Starship Troopers depicts “a society whose fixation on force has left it preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak. This state manifests as endless columns of cultishly revered and supremely well-equipped violence workers who know how to do only one thing, and a culture that exists exclusively to celebrate their efforts….”

I saw this lost dog sign on my walk yesterday. I hope they find the little guy. He looks sad. 📷

Lake Murray from Cowles Mountain, five miles from home, 2018. Maybe I’ll do the climb again this weekend. 📷

Two years ago today I was at the Google Next conference in San Francisco. I mistook another editor for a waiter at a stand-up cocktail reception and tried to take food off his plate.

Julie got me this cunning hat for my birthday yesterday, which I will wear with pride on my next trip back east in winter. I think it’s a great look for me. 📷

I don’t know how how to spell “entrepreneur” but I know there’s an extra R in there somewhere.

“Delicious, but too messy to handle,” was how Ruth Burt described the new ice cream treat her father, Harry Burt, concocted in 1920—a brick of vanilla ice cream encased in chocolate. So her brother, Harry Jr., offered a suggestion: Why not give it a handle?”

A brief history of the Good Humor ice cream truck: How the Ice Cream Truck Made Summer Cool, by Colin Dickey at Smithsonian Magazine.

In his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson makes a case that Franklin was one of the greatest people who ever lived, anywhere at any time.

Franklin rose from poverty to become a successful businessman, writer, publisher, journalist, diplomat, statesman, politician, and political philosopher. Success in any one of those fields could get him a couple of statues. Franklin succeeded in all.

Franklin was a leader in building a government that has lasted longer than any other extant today. No other major nation today is still using the government it had in the 18th Century.

Franklin was also a legitimate scientific genius.

And as a friend points out, Franklin invented technology that is still in use today: his stove, lightning rod and bifocals.

Also, Franklin invented swim fins, the urinary catheter and a musical instrument called the armonica. The last invention is not still in use much today, but it’s lovely.

Biden went into this campaign with his chief credential being that he was a nonentity who would do nothing. With Biden as President, Americans could go back to ignoring politics.

Instead, Biden is turning into a fire-breathing radical – and I love it.

He appears to be building an FDR-style transformative Presidency, which is what the US and the world need right now.

The fate of civilization and billions of lives literally depend on it.

Although now that I think of it, to call Biden a “radical” is wrong. When the house is on fire, it’s not radical to shout, “The house is on fire!”

I had not planned to spend quite so much time this morning updating my Mac but here we are.

When did we stop having “problems” and starting having “issues”? Because I have a problem with that.

Light and time are great ways to disinfect masks. Washing is generally unnecessary

James Hamblin MD, writing at The Atlantic:

Have several masks, made to fit well around your nose and mouth. Make them as heavily layered as you can tolerate. After wearing them for a day or so, or in a high-contact scenario, let them sit for a few days in a sunny, out-of-the-way place. Between the effects of time and light, there should be little need for running a washing machine or going through the hassle of hand-washing your masks….

If it sounds like I’m making this up based on best guesses, I am. Everyone is. We would ideally all be wearing surgical masks, and disposing of them frequently, but we didn’t prepare accordingly. So for all their flaws, cloth masks are important: Making them effective enough for use in daily pandemic life means we’re freeing up medical-grade masks for people who really need them, especially in places where they are still in short supply, such as the United States. Health-care workers around the world still need proper personal protective equipment more than a random guy named Gene who wants to go to the store to buy snacks.

Good news for me. I haven’t washed my masks in … well … ever.

The Amazon Critic Who Saw Its Power From the Inside: Tim Bray was a celebrated engineer at Amazon. Now, he is its highest-profile defector

Bray walked away from $1 million because he couldn’t stand Amazon’s labor and business practices anymore. Now he’s an outspoken advocate for breaking the company up.

Karen Weise writing at The New York Times:

SEATTLE — Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and a former vice president at Amazon, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he resigned for what he called “a vein of toxicity” running through its culture.

Within a few hours, his blog post about the resignation drew hundreds of thousands of views, and his inbox filled up with requests from journalists, recruiters and techies. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the post. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, Amazon’s highest-profile defector.

But there was more he wanted to say.

In the weeks since, he has aimed his brain power not at fixing a coding problem but at framing a broader critique of the company. In talks and blog posts that have drawn attention inside the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. Amid “the beating of the antitrust drums,” Mr. Bray wrote in one post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit.

“And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone,” he said.

Facebook is adding security and privacy protections to Messenger. That’s like Ghislaine Maxwell taking first aid classes so she can be a better babysitter for your teen-age girls.

We ordered a new couch which was supposed to arrive today but which seems to have disappeared in transit. I am haunted by the vision of it being sat on by people with poor personal hygiene who are eating Cheetos and wiping their fingers on the upholstery.

America can become the country claims to be, starting by telling the truth about its history of slavery, genocide and oppression. “Until we tell the truth we deny ourselves the opportunity for beauty.”

The Ezra Klein Show: Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal

Tucker Carlson, the most popular host in the history of cable news, returned from a week-long vacation after his head writer was exposed as a raging bigot. The scandal won’t stick.

Financially, it will cost some advertisers but Fox gets most of its revenue from subscribers, who love this kind of controversy.

Tucker Carlson’s America

I walked a different route than I usually do today, and saw several noteworthy vehicles. Two were classics, all had character. 📷

Lush photo essay from the golden age of shopping malls.

Cruising the Past & Future of the Retro Shopping Mall

I loved to go to the mall in my 20s. I’d go alone, during the day, get a fast food lunch, see what was new on the science fiction shelves at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks — anything by Asimov, Heinlein, Niven or Zelazny? A new Robert B. Parker? In that era before the mainstream internet and before I got plugged into science fiction fandom, the only way to find out if a favorite author had a new book out was to check in stores.

Then I’d catch a movie matinee. I’d find a spot directly under a light in the theater and read from one of my new books until the movie started.

That was a good afternoon.

From my journal two years ago: My Apple Watch alarm went off while I was watching the dishes, and without thinking about it I tapped the watch face with my nose to switch the alarm off. I believe I have hit on a breakthrough in nasal user interface design.

I was feeling down and blue so I spent a lot of time on social media and now I feel ever so much better and more cheerful, said nobody never.

📚I finished reading “Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic," by Tom “insert Spider-Man Joke Here” Holland. It’s a history of the rise to power of Julius Caesar and then a quick overview of the reign of Augustus. It’s one of the most readable histories I’ve read, very novelistic, which is not surprising, because Holland got his start as a novelist.

The Romans had a republic that lasted 500 years and was quickly replaced by a monarchy. That’s something that’s been on my mind based on the news of the past few years.

Next, I think I’ll read Holland’s follow-up: “Dynasty,” which covers the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero.

But first I’ll finish reading “The Annihilation Score,” a novel by Charles Stross, in his Laundry series.

Man, It’s Boss! Monogram’s Red Baron model kit, the Groovy Custom Show Rod Now at Your Favorite Store! (1968) via

I am continuing to fiddle with handwriting recognition (aka Scribble) on the iPad. I’m getting better at it but I don’t know if it will ever replace the onscreen keyboard.

I read multiple reviews that say Scribble is amazing even with the reviewers' awful handwriting. My awful handwriting is Scribble’s Waterloo.