Tending to your digital garden aka blog

Where did Digital Garden come from?

I saw the term “digital garden” coined by Joel Hooks.

The phrase “digital garden” is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.

Joel Hooks

Christopher Biscardi has a slightly different take where he says there is a difference between a blog and a Blog.

My personal site is a digital garden, which is a word that has fairly recently been coined to describe a different standpoint on what a blog is. A Digital Garden is lowercase b blogging. It’s writing without worrying about what people will think. It’s writing in small, unfinished pieces and building them up to larger more edited pieces, in public. This is in contrast to big B blogging, which can be thought of as writing a 6k+ word thinkpiece or the authoritative work on topic X without shipping any smaller pieces.

Christopher Biscardi

My thoughts about a digital garden

It’s a wonderful statement, but I also think that a normal “blog post” (or Blog as Christopher would put it) is never truly complete. Stories and language can change, and stories should be updated.

I’m often tending to old posts and pruning language I wouldn’t use today. I’m also adding extra pieces as my memory changes and I’m finding new bits to add.

If the piece is significantly updated, then I will change the post date to today so others can read or re-read my old content. This helps people discover both the old and new you, and they may find something they didn’t know before.

For example, my post Dealing with Performance Anxiety and Depression as a Web Developer [1] was updated this week, and I added a significant amount of changes which I believe are critical for old and new readers of that post.

I’m hopeful that people will discover something that can help them. And I’m also hopeful that they will discover something new about me.

Of course, this isn’t just about me or you as a person. Your blog may have tutorials on programming, talk about health and beauty, healthy eating, music, videos etc. These all change over time, and information is always discovered which means if you find that discovery on something you’ve posted before, then you should probably update that post.

What are your thoughts about this? How are you tending to your digital garden?

Of course, I open the floor to you. What are your thoughts, and do you tend to your digital garden? Let me know in the comments below.