How This Garden Grows

This site is a digital garden. Not a blog, not a portfolio, not a publication schedule.

A blog is chronological. Old posts sink. A garden is more spatial. Pages link to each other, get revised, and sometimes stay rough because the rough version is still useful.

The finished thing is nice when it happens. The process is usually more useful.

Private graph, public projection

Behind the public site is a private knowledge graph: Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, normal folders, and Obsidian-style links.

That graph is the source of truth. I work in it directly. The public Garden is a curated projection of a small part of it.

Not everything belongs here. Personal notes, contact details, internal material, and raw logs stay private. Public pages are selected because they still make sense after the dust settles.

How a note moves

A page usually starts as a small note: a few sentences, a project observation, a process I do not want to lose.

Some notes stay private. Some become drafts. Some become public pages. A few get revised often enough that they turn into process pages or project notes.

There is no sacred finished state. If the thinking changes, the page can change.

Stack

The Garden runs on Quartz v5. The source files are plain Markdown. There is no CMS, no database, no admin panel.

Edit files. Build static HTML. Deploy.

The private graph syncs through Nextcloud. The public site is built from a separate content directory and deployed to shared hosting.

Total infrastructure: one local machine, one shared hosting plan, a pile of text files.

Human and machine

I use an AI assistant to help maintain the graph and draft Garden content.

The split is simple: the assistant can draft, check links, find stale references, and keep boring mechanics from eating the day. I decide what is public, what is private, and what sounds like me.

Nothing should go public just because a machine produced a plausible page.

Why a garden

I make things: software, plots, prints, notebooks, tools, processes. A lot of that work used to sit on drives or in conversations.

A Garden gives some of it a place to live without pretending every page is an announcement.

Some notes here are polished. Some are not. That is fine.

See also: Things, Processes, Workbench, From Pixel to Pen, Userbase 1