On digital gardens

Because of Tris, I'm experimenting with cultivating a Digital Garden. It might be just the ticket.

Etymology: Where the "digital garden" term came from

Digital gardens - etymology
Maggie Appleton's authoritative highlights two important inflection points in history:

And according to Appleton:

If anyone should be considered the original source of digital gardening, it’s Caufield.

What "digital garden" means

Terminology

Fast twitch information discovery happens. The firehose of content. But with an undercurrent of creating new connections.

Campfires

Gardens

Set up

It was surprisingly easy to set up, following the default instructions, using a GitHub repo and Vercel. I'd not used Vercel before - it's quite neat. It seems to let me host it under a custom domain for free.

But maybe if I wrote my own Github Action to publish to Pages then it wouldn't break so much, or at least, I wouldn't be so surprised when it did.

I did a quick search to compare the two:

If you're looking to host a simple static website, personal portfolio, or blog, GitHub Pages is an excellent and cost-effective option. It integrates well with GitHub repositories and offers an easy deployment process.

On the other hand, if you require more advanced features like serverless functions, better performance, or support for modern frameworks, Vercel is the superior choice.

I certainly don't need "serverless functions" or "support for modern frameworks" - in that I'd prefer to write my own pipeline. I would like "better performance", and Vercel did publish quickly when it worked. But it broke a lot, and I did see people out on the web complaining that they'd hit its publish limits.

So I'll try switching to GitHub Pages soon, when I get a sec.

Themes

I'd like to find a theme explorer for Digital Garden. They have documentation on themes, but no page that I could find showing you what they all look like.

Side thoughts