
My blog is a digital garden, not a blog - shrthnd
https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
======
AndrewStephens
A couple of observations from someone who has a scattershot blog:

* Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers.

* Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to.

The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of
independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are
important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is
going to scroll through a date-sorted index.

If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article,
implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your
content by topic.

~~~
Jaruzel
> _Nobody reads posts in chronological order._

No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based
path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how
fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a _recent_
post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.

~~~
brudgers
You're advocating arranging my thoughts so a web crawling bot can sell more
ads. Fuck Google.

~~~
andrewzah
This is... not how ads/webcrawling works? I'm probably about as anti-google as
anyone here, but blindly chanting a mantra benefits no one.

If we think about this logically, it makes sense that putting content into
formats that the webscraping bot recognizes would score better than formats
that it doesn't recognize.

For what it's worth, you can also put the date in semantic html tags. [0, 1,
2] Not only is this pretty easy, it also makes the site more accessible to
people who use screen readers, etc. Here is how I do it (statically
generated). [3]

[0]:
[https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp](https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp)

[1]: [http://schema.org/Article](http://schema.org/Article)

[2]: [https://schema.org/datePublished](https://schema.org/datePublished)

[3]: [https://github.com/azah/personal-site-
public/blob/master/pos...](https://github.com/azah/personal-site-
public/blob/master/posts/building-home-server-freenas/index.html#L65)

~~~
brudgers
I'm not anti-google. I'm anti-distraction. Logically, there is a best
toothpaste for gardening but shopping for it won't change the number of weeds
that need pulling or put more cucumbers on the vine.

Living in the imaginary world where fame and fortune come from Google search
results is easier than facing the blank page.

------
quanticle
Gwern [0] also organizes his site in a similar fashion, for similar reasons.
He writes for the "long now" [1] and organizes his site and his writing with
people 60-70 years down the line in mind. Overall, I find gwern.net to be one
of the best laid out and organized sites on the Internet.

[0]: [https://gwern.net](https://gwern.net)

[1]: [https://www.gwern.net/About#long-site](https://www.gwern.net/About#long-
site)

~~~
shrthnd
Thank you for sharing!

------
jlelse
"Blog" comes from "weblog" and logs usually have some time of timestamp,
right?

Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out
the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is.

In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above
the content[0].

It's fine to have a curated homepage though.

[0]: [https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-
above/](https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/11/dates-above/)

------
saagarjha
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.

I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.

~~~
sebdd
Sure, it should be mentioned somewhere. But chronological order isn't
necessarily the most logical order for posts on a personal site's homepage.

~~~
smichel17
That's different than not having a date on the post _at all_.

------
andreyk
I've sort of gotten away from thinking I have a 'blog', to thinking I have a
'personal website' which features my writing on there. I think 'digital
garden' is a nice little metaphor for a personal website, and that 'digital
museum' is perhaps even more accurate -- a curated and aesthetically organized
set of artifacts that on the whole reflect who I am and my work / life.

For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal,
you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly
easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view
long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result:
[http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/](http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/)

------
kiwicopple
My blog is also like this -
[https://paul.copplest.one](https://paul.copplest.one)

Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later
(mostly from HN).

It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code
snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems).

I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of
everything I’ve ever learned

------
andrewzah
I'm also revamping my website (zola->hugo) and I was debating on whether to
have a chronological list, or to separate my posts into cohesive groups. Such
as Programming, korean, Self, etc. See [0] for an example.

> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.

One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a
javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean
I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post
listings (it is always shown on the post itself).

Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the
discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or
1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist
in a vacuum.

[0]: [https://os.phil-opp.com/](https://os.phil-opp.com/)

~~~
follower
Would you mind sharing your reason(s) for moving from Zola to Hugo?

When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so
I'm curious to know what your experience with it was.

Thanks!

~~~
andrewzah
I have happily used Zola for the last ~2+ years.

I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and
hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get
custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As
far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the
yak and write my own implementation. Yuk.

Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people
this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola.

Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable
extending / forking one over the other.

You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my
website here [1].

[0]:
[https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md](https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md)

[1]: [https://github.com/azah/personal-blog](https://github.com/azah/personal-
blog)

------
uneekname
I have a similar concept for my site, with no publish dates and handwritten
content/styling. One difference is that I haven't been using a static site
generator, which I'm on the fence about using. On one hand it sounds like a
much easier way to incorporate mixed media when I create a page, but on the
other it feels like needless bloat for such a simple project.

I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using
that.

------
skrebbel
Note to the author: if I click the "Check it out" link near the bottom, the
URL changes but nothing happens. Win10, Edge (pre-chromium I think).

------
ilikejam
Why not just use a wiki?

~~~
tonetheman
That is a great question... I could be off a bit here because I have looked at
static site generators and blogging systems and only like 1 wiki setups
(tiddly).

I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base
that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to
setup/use/customize?

But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the
answer is interesting.

~~~
qznc
What would be the advantage of a wiki?

To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and
having to worry about web security.

Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?

~~~
kixiQu
I use tiddlywiki's node server and markdown plugin (behind a yubikey auth
setup with nginx). It means that the data is stored in markdown files in a
folder (with accompanying blah.md.meta files tiddlywiki maintains) but I can
still edit easily from my phone, multiple computers, etc. there's a command to
load files in (get the meta files and index in place), so I was thinking about
using inotify to monitor a folder to be able to slurp in files from there, but
I've been happy just editing through the browser and sometimes grabbing the
.md files for use elsewhere.

again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only
nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's
recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great.

also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen
anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki,
which is something like
[https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html](https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html)
at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other
notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to
notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown
files, just the view layer.

------
jslakro
This is a powerful idea, week by week I read efforts from tech community for
building personal information management tools. You just need to see Notion
growth. Concept of organic wikis and that web 1.0 - 90's nostalgic idea with a
bit of decentralized/self hosted content is absolutely a trend

------
johnchristopher
The problem is always the same when putting out a website: what's your content
- your added value, who are your prospects/readers ?

Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered
those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and
your readers meet.

------
Funes-
I'd like to ask the author if he would be willing to justify the text on his
"digital garden". It would make for a better reading experience in my opinion.
Also, your site would benefit from grouping or ordering posts by topic.

~~~
dade_
I hate reading justified text, so I guess I know why it exists. Some people
like it, good to know.

~~~
Funes-
I guess you don't read many books or academic research, then.

