I happened upon the phrase digital garden¹²³ and it quite resonated with me — it's basically what I'm doing here. To push the gardening metaphor to the extreme though I think what I'm going for is a herb garden situation. Something for me to go back to from time to time, or to give a few things to a friend now and then. I've seen others (Visa is a primary example) who emphasise the public in "Learning in public" much more, but that's now really where I'm at.

Metadata

Type

My notes have types mainly to allow me to render them differently on my website. I use the following types:

• Note. This is just the default document type.
• Blog post. For if I'm writing something that is intended as more of a once-off, permanent article (see Cactus below).
• Book. For notes/reviews of books I'm reading.

Status

Like I few things in my digital garden I've nicked this concept from Maggie Appleton's website. I have the following statuses on notes:

• 🌱 Seedling. This is for notes that are just starting out and I'm not really clear on the direction of yet. These will be super rough and likely not too useful to anyone but myself.
• 🌿 Budding. This is for notes that I've put a bit of time and editing into. They're probably legible enough for others, but I'm still working through my thoughts on the topic.
• 🌲Evergreen. These notes are "complete" in the sense that they can be read as a coherent whole, however I will still be updating them over time.
• 🌵Cactus. These are notes that are written once and won't be touched again (cactus, get it? 😉). Essentially these are blog posts or snapshots in time.

I'm just trying this out and I expect to iterate a bit on it over time (including probably dropping the plant metaphor for something I'm more familiar with).

Tags

When adding tags to a note I limit myself to a maximum of 3 tags. This will hopefully prevent the creation of too many niche one-off tags.

Further reading

Digital Garden Terms of Service