Gardener's guide
A digital garden exists somewhere in the space between a blog and a commomplace book. It does not follow the itemised and labelled format of a blog, but unlike a commonplace book it holds some degree of structure. This structure, along with the meaning of the term 'digital gardening', depends entirely on who you ask, but tends to follow the same basic principles. This page will provide a better description of what digital gardening means to me, and, with any luck, might provide an introduction to the concept for a handful of readers.
I try to follow a minimalist standard with this website which, was constructed entirely using CSS and HTML. No external templates, no javascript (except for MathJax, but the alternative is loading in images for every line of math so we let it slide). I took a lot of inspiration from Mark Bernstein's essay [ Hypertext Gardens ] . He likens the motivations behind and layouts of digital gardens to those of physical gardens, emphasising the balance they strike between the allure of the wilderness and the accessibility of the urban.
I have tried to avoid index pages in general, with the exception of the root digital garden page which is intended to serve as the entrace. As a result some pages may only be accessed either by their direct link or by stumbling across them through other pages. This is perhaps not a "smart" web design choice, but it does incentivise a more in-depth exploration of the content for those who, like me, prefer that style of navigation. The virtues of flattened layouts where everything is accessible within a few clicks have been extolled to no end by various design sources, but the most engaging experiences I've had online have been with websites that take the opposite approach. So often the tangents and distractions I experience in my search for some specific piece of information are more insightful than the piece itself.
You may at this point be wondering "how do I make my own digital garden?" The answer is, get yourself a web domain and upload something! I currently host this website through a Github Pages server and display it on this domain, but before that I used [ neocities ] - a free and open-source web-hosting service that supports the Web Revival. There are endless resources to help you get started with web design, but the neocities intro tutorial is more than enough to get started with.