Thoughts On Digital Gardens In 2024
I'm at the tail end of making my own website builder 1 . It's lead me to some thinking about digital gardens :
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Traditional website tooling paradigms don't jive well with the a garden approach. Unless there's a super easy way make things really different, there's not a lot of exploration that's gonna happen
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Something I did a while ago is made a links 2 site and then used subdomains for the foundation of my digital garden. Each sub - domain being it's own thing. The freedom of starting fresh each time was a huge contributing factor in the amount I made
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The reason I went with the sub - domains is because I was running nextjs for my main site at the time. It was just too much friction to experiment and play with. So, I'd pop new subdomains whenever I wanted to mess around with a new idea
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One of the design goals for my site builder is to make it easy to work on my primary domain for these experiments and sandboxes. I've got it set up so that I can add metadata to a page that will change templates, or keep the basic template, but skip the css. More importantly, I can add CSS and JavaScript directly to my content files. Any page can be completely stand - alone from the main structure of the site with no extra overhead
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My plan is to make the home page of the site function like the links page does now. It'll have projects on it instead of being a list of posts. This will be done by hand and first and eventually with a config file where I'll automate things like the latest posts in different categories, etc...
It comes down to reducing friction. The more effort it takes to do something different, the less likely it is I'll try it. Until I reduced the friction by using subdomains I didn't realize how much I wasn't doing.
I'm on v38 of my site builder. Even in the early prototype stages I could feel a big difference in how much more I was making because there was less drag. Whether you call it a digital garden or just a website, my suggestion is to pay attention to how much friction it takes to make things and do what you can to reduce it as much as possible. It's a lot more fun when it feels less like work.
My links site is here :
Fair warning that several things are broken while I'm retooling everything.
The top link on the links page is :
How To Grow Your Digital Garden With Sub-Domains
The general idea is making lots of subdomains for experiments. I'm moving away from that because the tooling I'm setting up now let's me have the same low - friction way to build things while keeping them on my primary domain. That said, it's still a viable strategy though if your using something that gets in the way of trying new things
A big part of the reason I wrote my own website builder was to make it easier to experiment with my site. I don't tend to think of it as a "digital garden" these days, but I still like the term and it's a good framing for thinking about the work that goes into a site
Footnotes And References
- Neopoligen Website Builder
This is the tool I've been working on for the past two years that built this site.
- My Links Site
This will largely be going away. After I finish up Neopoligen I'll be migrating most of the content back onto this main site. (A big reason I wrote the site builder is because I couldn't easily make things on my main site and the sub - domains where a temporary measure while I figured that ou2gmkhvfrt)