Digital Gardening

I’m currently undergoing a bit of a refactor of my personal knowledge management (PKM) approach. Up until now I’ve been a victim of the collector’s fallacy in which one can trick themselves into a false sense of security RE: learning by bookmarking everything that looks interesting for processing later. I use Wallabag, which is a self-hosted bookmark reading app similar to Pocket, to collect articles that I might want to read later. The problem is that I’ve ended up with hundreds of unread articles in my to-read list and I’ve not ended up doing much with the material that I have read. I want to get into the habit of reading articles more thoroughly, taking notes and linking them back to material I’ve read elsewhere.

A couple of weeks back I started looking into building a Zettelkasten inside Joplin which has been my app of choice for personal knowledge management for a few years. One of the biggest problems I found with this is that navigating between notes inside Joplin still feels quite unintuitive even with some of the very cool plugins installed like the node graph visualiser. I also find it quite difficult writing “just for myself” - if I can trick my brain into thinking that someone else might read my writing I’m often able to write more. This has inspired me to try and find a suitable way to move as much as my knowledgebase as is appropriate into the public eye (I won’t be sharing birth certificates or insurance policies, those will stay in my private joplin vault).

What is a Digital Garden?

Digital Gardens are essentially public zettelkastens. Basically you create your own “wiki-like” site where you collect your notes and write them up in a way that is semi-publishable.

The digital garden metaphor extends to the notes that you create as you create them. Initially you start by dumping some initial thoughts and comments in a page. This is a seedling. You then start to connect your seedling note to other pieces of information in your garden by linking them together and you start to tidy up the content. Once your note is an established part of the garden (it’s got incoming and outgoing links to a few things) and it’s clear it’s budding. Finally when you think a page is more or less complete it becomes evergreen. Obviously information can go out of date and pages need updating and editing just as real plants need watering and pruning.

For further reading Maggie Appleton has a really good long read about digital gardening and the seedling/budding/evergreen metaphor.

Getting Some Inspiration: What Others are Doing

I started by looking at some other folks’ Digital Gardens such as Andy’s Notes, Tom Critchlow’s wikifolder and Chris Aldrich’s garden. It’s plain to see that some of these gardens have been in progress for years and contain huge amounts inter-linked knowledge. Some of them have very cool flashy UX experiences like the ability to hover over a link in a note and preview the next note or open each note in a column progressively from left to right.

What I Tried

I really liked the idea of using a theme like gatsby-garden to provide a flashy UX with links in between notes on top of simple markdown files. However, I found I just couldn’t get on with Gatsby - I couldn’t make it do what I wanted in terms of structuring my collections and after a few hours of faff I gave up. I ended up looking at different wiki packages instead. I recently tried out bookstack and whilst its shiny and polished, I don’t feel like its flexible enough for what I need (illustrative example: I want to be able to create wiki links to pages that don’t exist yet and “click through” to create them. In bookstack you need to create pages before you link them). I also tried out wikijs which uses markdown and offers a lot of flexibility to the user.

What I Settled On

Eventually though, I settled on an old favourite in dokuwiki. I have a softspot for dokuwiki. I’ve been using it for about a decade and I had an instance set up as a personal wiki for tracking notes and learnings while I was at university. I stopped using it when I moved a lot of my knowledge (or should I say collections of “stuff” that I haven’t learned properly as per collector’s fallacy) into Evernote and then into Joplin.

Dokuwiki is mature, fast, lightweight to run and simple to use. The interface is simple and unpretentious so whilst I don’t get the snazzy pop-overs when I hover on a link, it renders really fast and doesn’t put any pressure on my browser. The only real downside I’ve found so far is that the wiki syntax is slightly different to Markdown.

What Next

I’ve set up my new digital garden/zettelkasten/personal wiki/second brain here and the idea is that I will try to maintain it by adding my knowledge and thoughts on different topics as I encounter them rather than collecting a bunch of stuff that I will never get around to reading. I intend to move a lot of my web clippings and bookmarks out of joplin and wallabag into my digital garden and trash stuff that no longer feels relevant.

Dokuwiki has a pretty powerful ecosystem and API so I’m looking at where I can automate some activities too.