23 May 2023 – Making a tiny digital garden

Somewhere between a blog and a journal, a digital garden is a place to think through writing, through connecting and linking with other ideas. It is a place for learning. Over time, in public.

To quote the well-known Caulfield talk

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

I had a newsletter originally, all the rage these days. But I was unhappy with Substack’s data tracking and the move to Buttondown never stuck – it was unbearably ugly and the impetus for a regular cadence felt too much after a while.

Denise says, after Matt Ruby, that blogging is dead. Ah well. I like blogs. Every new post on the blogs I follow – Denise, Gemma, Alice, Victor – is a little treat. Good company to be in, imo.

And since this little garden doesn’t have any tracking, I will never know who, if anyone, is reading. Standard data practices have made creepy behaviour the norm and I am absolutely not here for it.

In A Handmade Web, J. R. Carpenter says

I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to suggest slowness and smallness as a forms of resistance.

Resistance to social media giants, multinational corporations, data-saturated systems and surveillance technologies.

I don’t know what shape this will take, but it’s a garden for small thoughts, occasional musings, nascent ideas and slow learning.

Thanks to Jon Heslop for helping me get this up and running with Eleventy and Netlify. Your patience with my endless texts is unparalleled.