Starting a Garden šŸ…

I redid my site again; this post goes over why, and what's changed this time around.

5 min read

I redid my site! … again!

I’ve been messing around with the look and feel of this site on a dev branch for a few months, and started a dedicated feature branch for the overhaul a few weeks ago. I’m pretty happy with the look, but I made more than just stylistic changes. I added some content types, ripped out some features, and moved all my old content over to /garden/posts

So what gives? what is a digital garden anyways? when’s the next redesign šŸ˜‰?

What’s a Digital Garden

I won’t spend too much time digging in, but I stand on the shoulder’s of dev giant’s here. Maggie Appleton has a great post going over the concept, and so does Joel Hooks. With their explanations in mind, I have a few other things that I think feel garden-like in the way I’ve designed the site this time around:

Keep it messy

I don’t want everything on this site to have the implicit pressure that a ā€œBlog Postā€ does. Believe it or not, I don’t want everything I write to be pristine. Sometimes I just want to put my thoughts out into the aether, without a lot of formality. See if they stick. Use them as a reference point. See what others think. You know?

With that in mind, I’ve added a bunch of new content types: notes, photos, and links to de-stress posting here.

A lot of my ethos for this site was inspired by something from one of Rach Smith’s note’s:

I dropped the baggage around ā€œblog postā€ … started thinking about my notes as works in progress, learning in public rather than complete pieces of work. The mental shift helped me quit overthinking about what I published.

She also calls her site a digital garden… what a coincidence!

Keep it simple

I’ve kept the site architecturally simple by design. There aren’t a lot of super-complex features. The post likes and comments I had on here before were great, but were examples of features that had heavy vendor lock-in and just kind of felt ā€œheavyā€.

This site could realistically live on a 11 year old computer in a basement, but tools like Netlify add goodies on top without weighing things down.

in 5-10 years, I don’t want to lose a bunch of photos, ideas, and little pieces of my personal history because a billion-dollar baby blew up my website. This site is all .astro files, markdown, and open-source packages with a little progressively enhanced sugar on top.

Be a good steward

I see posting to my own site as an act of Internet stewardship. An independent and individual internet is a healthy internet. By keeping it simple I’ve pretty much minimized my barrier of entry to hanging out on the internet and helping take care of it.

This doesn’t just mean posting on this little hermit island of a website, it means sharing and consuming RSS feeds, cross-posting, experimenting with new and equitable internet tech (ActivityPub?) and generally making content accessible and shareable across the internet and for all people. It also means building relationships through the web, which I’m very grateful to say that I’ve been doing for awhile, Digital Garden or not.

The IndieWeb page for POSSE got me thinking about this awhile ago; it’s a good read if you’re interested in this concept.

What else has changed

Now that you know what a Digital Garden is, here’s a some of the other things that have changed:

Things added

Things removed

More coming soon!

I’ve you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

I’m going to be posting here more and more so if you’re subscribed I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me real soon.

Have a great day!

About me

I'm Mykal Machon, I'm a web developer / coffee nerd from British Columbia, Canada. I'm currently working at the University of the Fraser Valley as a Systems Analyst.

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