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On digital gardens

Whenever i have an idea for an essay or project, I always put it off because of one obligation or another. As the days go by, the idea fade bit by bit from neglect, eventually disappearing completely.

I like the idea of a digital garden because I don't need to create a "complete" thing. Gardens are organic, blooming and wilting with the seasons.

Initial inspirations

Gardens are like open-world games, it's a web space that encourages exploration and tangents. Time is of no concern. It doesn't really matter if one flower bloomed before the other.

"The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships"

Streams are linear and chronological. Rather than walking around, information comes to you.

"In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.

... the Stream replaces topology with serialization. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center."

Hypertext Gardens

"A rigid design might provide identical thumb tabs on each page leading to the hypertext's entrances; a more fluid design might always offer both some consistent choices and some choices unique to each writing space."

"Where a rigid design places separate, stand-alone items within a navigational shell, an organic design might interweave relevant sections, enhancing an old section by providing a new path to new material or showing how a new contribution illuminates or responds to another page. This fluidity helps break monolithic articles and white papers into smaller, more natural units, pieces of writing that can be reread and relinked in new and unexpected contexts. "

Stuff to keep in mind when building this site!