What is this place?
This is a digital garden, specifically Cam’s digital garden. Attempt after attempt at creating a personal blog/portfolio has yielded poor results for many reasons. This site is my attempt to remedy that by building it on top of a tool I already love using.
That tool is Obsidian. After discovering Obsidian in 2020, I dove head first into the world of personal knowledge management. The ideas of building forests of notes in different levels of maturity and links between them being first class citizens appealed to me. I began my note making journey in my personal vault.
What is a digital garden?
A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.
Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”
There has been quite a bit written by far more prudent people that goes over A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. Generally speaking, a digital garden is a collection of information that doesn’t flow linearly in time like a blog does. Instead each node of information can be cultivated and enriched at different points in time.
In a similar way to Joel Hooks’ digital garden, deploying this with Quartz and Hugo is giving me an opportunity to till the earth and start fresh.
What to expect
Because of the nature of a digital garden, content will be changing rather often. Any given day a specific page on this site may be wildly different than any other day. Hopefully that neat graph view on the side starts lighting up with content and links, and it becomes a fun tool to navigate with. If you want to keep up with changes as they happen, I’ve set things up to update the RSS feed whenever I modify a page.