Starting a digital garden

Recently came across this article about digital gardens and it made me rethink my approach to blogging. So, I've decided to start one by adding a /notes section.

Why /notes?

The problem I had with WordPress - and my old mindset around blogging - was that every post felt like it had to be a perfect piece of work. It needed a catchy headline, a polished intro, and a tidy concluding thought. If I didn't have all the answers yet, the post just sat in my drafts folder until it became irrelevant - mostly due to me spending time fighting the "expectations" of what a blog should be rather than writing.

Now that I've switched to 11ty, it's much easier to just write and commit without worrying about it being perfect.

Seeds, not statues

In the notes section, I'll be dropping in things that don't quite fit the "Post" mold:

• Growing ideas
• Half-finished thoughts or posts
• Quick technical snippets (like how I set up 11ty)

As these grow, they might eventually graduate into posts. Or they might just stay as useful little "seeds" of information.

Learning (and wrestling) in public

The big goal here is to stop overthinking. I used to think that unless I had a complete post, it wasn't worth publishing.

This changes that.

Who knows, these little notes might be useful to someone else; they'll definitely be useful to "future me" when I forget how I solved it six months from now.

Keeping it simple

I'm keeping the setup as simple as possible. Each note is just a Markdown file sitting in my src/notes/ directory. They aren't meant to be "finished" - they're meant to be tended. Some notes will wither and get deleted if they turn out to be dead ends. Others might grow into something much bigger.

For now, I'm just happy to have a place where I can plant a seed and see what happens.

Catch you on the next build! 🚀