Why I rebuilt this site as a digital garden
Notes are not blog posts. Trading a chronological feed for an interlinked, always-evolving knowledge base — and why that lowers the bar to actually write.
I let my blog go quiet for almost two years. The problem wasn’t ideas — it was the format. A blog is a chronological stream of finished posts, and “finished” is a high bar. A digital garden is the opposite: a set of interlinked notes I tend over time, each tagged with a growth stage 🌱 → 🌿 → 🌳. Publishing a half-formed seedling is not just allowed, it’s the point.
What changed mechanically
- Wiki-links. I can reference another note inline with double brackets and it resolves to the right URL automatically. For example, this garden grew out of my older posts on writing with MDX and on edge functions.
- Backlinks. Each note shows which other notes link to it (scroll to “Linked references” on those older posts now — this note appears there). The web of ideas builds itself.
- Stages over dates. A note’s maturity matters more than when I wrote it.
The stack, briefly
Rebuilt on Astro (static-first, ~zero JS by default), with wiki-links and backlinks as small build-time plugins, Pagefind for search, and client-side Mermaid so there’s no headless browser in the build. It deploys as static files — no server to babysit.
This note is a seedling. It’ll grow.