What is a Digital Garden?

I understand my Digital Garden as a collection of free form, interconnected & evolving ideas that grow over time. Like plants grow in a real-world garden. I also have a Writing section on my site, so you might ask: “Why do you then also have a Digital Garden?”

Coming up with ideas of what to write about or sharing the necessary information to e.g. explain a concept isn’t too hard. During a normal workday or also in my free time there’s enough input of what to write about — it’s also easy enough to share a code snippet and a short paragraph of why, what & how. That’s never the problem. After reading A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden & My blog is a digital garden, not a blog it became clear to me that I haven’t written/published as much as I could as I saw my blog (called “Writing” on my site now) as this place for only highly polished, lengthy articles that have a “certain” quality standard. As I said, getting an idea and sharing the crucial information is easy; it’s really hard to wrap the information into enough context so that the target audience can follow your train of thought, that it’s entertaining and/or interactive.

So there wasn’t a place for those short, interconnected & evolving thoughts on my blog and thus I never published them. But with a Digital Garden I now have a place for all these ideas; without a psychological barrier that it wouldn’t be “good enough” for my Writing section.