My first experience with the term “digital gardening” was in this adult swim commercial for “For Profit Online University”. In that context digital gardeners were basically people given jobs on Mechanical Turk. Ive used the term with my friends over the last decade to describe any sort of endless digital grind-like toil. New crypto games come to mind. (So does Animal Crossing…)
Isn’t this kind of like Soylent branding. Not sure if that shake company name was tongue in cheek or if they didn’t know there’s a Charlton Heston movie called Soylent Green where the Soylent refers to the color of the edible substance made from humans
Feel free to post your digital garden under to not pollute this garden too much. Gardeners like to see other gardens.
There are different kinds of digital gardens. Mine[0] lives on Github and it evolves slowly these days but I like to think that is well tendered and organized - for my taste. There's some juicy fruit and vegetables. Probably you will find some weeds also but weeds are flowers too when you get to know them.
no way, are you part of 100 rabbits?, I've been following your sailboat posts for a while and I've cooked a bunch of the recipes from your site. So cool to see you here.
Your web page and those similar excel in relation to my own interpretation of what a “digital garden” is by being architecturally sound. I mean that I can visit your page not knowing what to expect but after reading the headings, I can instantly tell that I am interested in what’s being offered. Good information architecture is really what makes personal websites or blogs that are given the label “digital gardens” stand out to me.
I’m still working on mine, if it is destined for me to ever share…
Decoupling a garden from profit motives helps a lot in that regard. When you're not trying to my lure anyone into a sales funnel, you can afford straight talk.
When I'm not doing core product, I'm gardening - Importing new datasets, trying out "growing" new neural nets, exploring niche areas not related to the core product, improving the speed of execution, making the interfaces cleaner.
All of these tasks are like gardening in that they are not product critical, but it's a relaxing activity at the end of the day to "potter in the digital garden"
I love this metaphor. I get enormous satisfaction from tending to my digital garden, just pottering around for no reason other than fun. Mine is https://www.longfetch.com/
I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s gardens in this thread too.
Loved your blogging style. Would be curious to see more about your journey learning clojure and maybe some highlights and examples of what you learn by using the new language.
Thanks! I can recommend writing, even just short stuff, I think it helps consolidate things you have learned (or just lets you show off your skateboard collection)
if/when I get back to clojure, maybe I'll even code something in it and write about it after :)
I have my digital garden as a mediawiki-based website which is only accessible within my home network (and my vpn).
It runs on a small (yet capable!) computer in the corner of my living room.
It's lovely because mediawiki is just great, and I share that garden with my SO.
Among the niceties, I have collected the PDF manuals for the various appliances that we bought over the years, and there's a nice template to embed the pdf into a wiki page. No need for wondering where that instruction manual is today.
Taking tech notes works very well too, because mediawiki can display math just fine (mathjax and stuff) and can highlight code in a decent amount of languages.
Oh, and galleries look beautiful in mediawiki. And the template (the Timeless skin) looks nice on mobile too.
The editing experience is nice, now that VisualEditor is built-in into MediaWiki.
After two years and a couple hundred pages, it only weighs about ~350 megabytes.
I'm thinking about making a public version, as a personal website.
Notes:
- i'd love to have the ability to install an equivalent of the mobile app for my private wiki.
- the computer is a fujitsu esprimo q520 (core i5-4590T 4c4T, 16GB ram, 250gb main ssd + 1tb data ssd + 4TB backup external magnetic disk).
It is an apt metaphor I use regularly as I have a large and growing vegetable and flower garden as well as a growing server farm with services I tend to more than others. They are both labors of love, learning, and growth. I share the fruits of both with friends and family.
We run our company with a forest in mind. Client projects are gardens within the forest. We have a green house for seedlings (innovation projects), we have a fire in the center, where we regularly meet and hang out. We have an outlook point, where we look out to sense what’s on the horizon… obviously, we don’t want our gardens full of weeds or trash laying around.
I like this metaphor too. A personal space for blogging and small projects gives me more long term satisfaction than my day job. (It has more longevity too.)
My projects can be polished or rough, technically boring or complex, and have as little or significant purpose as I want.
They won’t be cancelled by changing business needs, rushed by deadlines, and corrupted by politics.
What software would you recommend to maintain a 'community garden', collectively with others? Where the tech isn't in-your-face and leaves room to be creative together, stimulating people to contribute. Of course, this could be any forum or collaboration software combined with good old community-building, but maybe there's software that particularly fits this 'gardening' idea.
I love this. Having operated https://rietta.com for 23 years and counting. Maintaining links and pages that are no longer my focus but history would be lessoned to have them vanish. It goes through phases that I fail to tend to it properly and then rushes to catch up and “save the plants”.
I have written the same file parser over a dozen times. It's my default project when learning a new language.
Sometimes, newer solutions to different parts of the parser, having been discovered in the new language, find their way into the older versions.
I don't know if this qualifies as "gardening" but I've really enjoyed this experience because I can easily see growth. But maybe it really is pointless.
I am trying to figure out a more robust data store than just local MySQL on my Pi. I have encrypted data store on remote severs (by pass key/active login not RDS). But gotta deal with syncing...
Unrelated ranting
Also trying to think of ways to quickly write/access it any time. From other devices besides phones/computers seems pointless but yeah integrated into body somehow. Future.
Low res display on clothes. Conductive skin wrap. Wifi power harvesting posters. Projected keyboard grid these were cool. Vibration qwerty from bracelet. Vibrations felt from the desk. Doesn't make sense you need some way to see till Mojo contact is cheap, contacts suck though to put in/take out.
Hehe projected compute. You mount a projector on your ceiling, rotating mount has audio listener. Snap your finger, it goes to you, projects display on nearby space (cam), type on your legs by vibration and tap wall for mouse click. Also pointless why.
It's sometimes interesting to see all the revisions done to a blogpost. This is easy to do if the blog is hosted on Github Pages (which many blogs are). You can see a diff of each change and amendment (they're mostly typos). With a bit of digging you can hunt down the Github profile where the blog is hosted and have a nose.
It started as a work of love and remained that way.
The transition to living from it makes a big difference, even if you want to pretend it doesn't. However it's been so steady that I can afford puttering around and feel secure that the bills will get paid.
I can also tell advertisers to shove it, a rare privilege.
https://youtu.be/XQLdhVpLBVE (Concept is introduced at 6:30, but the whole video is hilarious)