I killed my digital garden, and it’s the best thing that happened to my sanity.

Well, technically it’s not dead. It has just been absorbed by my actual blog, and the blog incorporated the looks of my former digital garden.

I kept my digital garden for 4 years and amassed about 600 notes. It pales in comparison with the body of work from prolific writers like Alex Kehayias and Andy Matuschak, who have thousands of online notes and have been always a huge inspiration.

Despite not having that much published material, I started having quibbles about my system. This piece is an account of the issues that bothered me and how I fixed them.

Redundancy is pain (when it comes to personal knowledge management)

Let me remind you of what a Zettelkasten is. It’s first and foremost a repository of permanent notes, i.e. bite-sized pieces of information that will remain useful for a lifetime. At least this is what Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the Zettelkasten method, devised.

We may publish our Zettelkastens for others to see and call them “digital gardens”, but that’s just poetry. People enjoy the garden allusion because, like the actual one, a digital garden is pretty, makes you wanna show it to your friends, and it’s delightful to watch it grow.

However, the raison d’être of the system that underpins the digital garden is not to showcase ideas using professional web layouts and cool network graphs, but to aid us publish more. In other words, permanent notes exist to become papers, books, or—in my humble case–blog posts, and not to be pretty. And because publications are sorta permanent as opposite to gardens, which we constantly prune, refurbish, and redesign, a lot of problems arise from mingling the two.

Here’s an example.

I can’t stop editing my notes even long after I had published a blog post based on them. This is because I don’t truly believe in “permanent notes”. I think permanent notes should change as soon as your beliefs change. The world changes. The self is fluid and constantly changes. My opinion today may not be my opinion tomorrow. But this means that by reusing my notes on blog posts, I must keep track of multiple changes of the same thing.

That issue had probably never been in Luhmann’s radar because if a printed out paper or book contained a typo, or had sections that needed an update, there was nothing he could do about it except publishing an errata.

Alternative: move permanent notes to the blog

Eventually, some notes become mature and polished enough to turn integrally into blog posts. Fine. If I copied these notes onto my blog, there would be the redundancy problem mentioned previously. If I moved them instead, I would break all synapses of my digital garden around that note, which meant I’d have to find and update all notes that referenced it. (More work!)

Solution: no distinction between blog posts and permanent notes

There’s a minimum amount of effort required to write a blog post. It should have an introduction, a conclusion, and some yabba yabba in between, otherwise it would be best kept as a private note.

And that’s why I enjoy writing and publishing short notes rather than blog posts. With the former, I don’t feel the same pressure I feel with the latter.

On the other hand, there were times I wish a longer and more elaborate note could get more visibility as a blog post.

So why not keep the two kinds in the same place, and once the moment feels right, I just transform the note into a post without breaking anything?

That’s precisely what I did. After the upgrade, my system sees everything as notes: blog posts, bookmarks, grocery lists, everything.

When I want them to be rendered differently on my website, I just assign a different category to each. Unstructured, free-form entries are notes. Structured, long-form notes are posts. Notes with a link and a description are blogmarks.

I can’t describe how good it feels to deposit everything in one single place. Only after I overhauled everything I could notice how much mental energy I was spending with small decisions. “Is this going to be a blog post or a permanent note? Should I put it here or there?”

Now, I can focus on writing and delegate the choice of what category this piece is going to be until much later. Once decided, promoting a note to blog post or blogmark is just 17 keystrokes away: SPC m o CATEGORY posts ENTER on Doom Emacs. (Still working on this.)

Now, onward to the 1,000 notes mark!

Changelog

• 2023-09-24 - Reworded a few paragraphs that may not have made much sense to readers not inside my head.