How I use this digital garden

A digital garden is a website organized around notes and links instead of a dated stream of posts. Notes can change after publication. A short page can remain short. Old material can stay available without being presented as a current position.

That definition is broad enough to be useful. It also means there is no official way to do this correctly. The practical question is whether the site helps me keep, find, and develop ideas.

What belongs here

I add something when it has at least one of these:

an idea I expect to use again;
a connection to an existing note;
a record I would otherwise lose;
a question that has survived the first moment of interest;
enough context that another person can understand why I kept it.

A note does not need a complete argument. It needs a reason to exist.

The stages

Fragment means that little survives or that I have only a title, quotation, or lead.

Seedling means that the idea is present but the structure is not.

Budding means that the note has a shape and can be read on its own, although parts may change.

Evergreen means that the note is reasonably settled. It can still be revised.

Archived marks older work preserved for context. It is evidence of what I wrote at the time, not a quiet endorsement from the present.

The labels describe condition. They do not rank importance.

A small maintenance routine

When I add a note:

Give it a plain title that I might search for later.
State the point or problem near the beginning.
Link it to one or two notes that genuinely bear on it.
Add enough description for search results and link previews.
Assign an honest stage.

Every so often:

Open What’s top of mind and remove threads I am no longer pursuing.
Check new notes for useful links to older ones.
Merge notes that are making the same point at the same scale.
Move old projects to the museum when their main value becomes historical.
Leave small notes alone when they have already done their job.

What I am trying to avoid

The garden should not become another inbox or a second job. Collecting links without a note about why I kept them produces a bookmark archive. Creating a taxonomy before I have material produces empty shelves. Rewriting every note to sound finished removes the main advantage of the form.

There is also a temptation to spend more time adjusting the system than using it. A familiar occupational hazard. If I can find a note, understand why it is here, and connect it to later work, the system is doing enough.

How this site is arranged

The main paths are Writing, Thinking, Hobbies, and the Museum. The home page presents a few routes through them. Backlinks show where a note is used elsewhere.

The source files are ordinary Markdown kept in Obsidian. Quartz turns them into the public site. The files remain readable without either program, which seems like a sensible minimum for a notebook intended to last.