A Digital Garden Inventory
I have a two-fold fascination with digital garden personal websites.
Firstly, my fascination is with the structural departure from the more common chronological blog structure and linear writing. Digital gardens are conducive to exploring links and topics fluidly as my ADHD brain is prone to want to do.
Secondly, digital gardens provide a fascinating view of the author’s thinking process. Raw. Emergent. Frequently explicitly using questions, claims, evidence, and counter-points. A front-row seat to the dialogue the author is having with themselves and their sources.
Driven by this fascination, I went looking for more digital garden examples beyond the handful I had already explored.
In the following collection, I limited myself to “only” fifty examples. I discovered another twenty or so sites that were either light on content or had other shortcomings that lead me to not include them here.
For further background on digital gardens, I highly recommend Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, along with the much shorter How to set up your own digital garden from Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Ness Labs.
Digital Garden Examples
This collection is organized by primary topic (occasionally arbitrary with the extent of cross-disciplinary coverage), and then alphabetical by site name. Author names are links to Twitter accounts, if available. The quotes are from the authors, describing their work.
Business, Liberal Arts, and Sciences
Alexis Rondeau, by Alexis Rondeau. Writing about startups and business, adult ADHD, Personal Knowledge Management and productivity, and much more.
Small, interconnected notes that I write for myself to think, remember, connect and imagine more. Professionally, here are My “Greatest Hits”, My “Biggest Misses” and My “Best Shots”.
Chromatically, by Chromatic.
This vault is my personal notes that I have written in the course of completing my prerequisite classes to get into a Nursing program…I’ve found the act of writing down the course material in a way that is logical, clear and accurate has been the single most effective method for me to really understand what I’m studying.
Experiments in Hypertext Thinking, by Tom Critchlow. Writing about architecture, art, cooking, design, gaming, music, parenting, pedagogy, etc.
Joschua’s Garden, by Joschua. Writing about philosophy, psychology, logic, spirituality and religion, and natural and social sciences.
The Quantum Well, by fizziksBoris. Writing about quantum mechanics and its underlying mathematical principles.
This is an ongoing project to digitize, organize, and expand on all of my notes covering topics in mathematics and physics. The goal that drove the creation of this site is the desire to archive the body of material I’ve been exposed to through research and coursework. By doing this I want to solidify my understanding for a wide variety of topics I care about by writing about them and also by experimenting with ways to connect them in such a way that new insights may emerge.
Reasonable Deviations, by Robert Andrew Martin.
I am interested in finding intuitive quantitative explanations for complex phenomena, even if those intuitive explanations concede a lack of determinism. It’s always nice to find order in complexity, but it may very well be complex all the way down.
The Integral Guide to Well-Being, by anonymous. Mental health.
A choose-your-own-adventure field guide that I write to help myself recover from complex trauma and feel empowered and better-equipped to lead an enriched life.
The Refined Mind, by Mike Tannenbaum. Themes include attention, focus & effort; mindfulness; creativity and productivity; systems, technology & design; mental health, well-being & uncertainty; antiracism; and sustainability & environmentalism.
I believe writing is thinking, so these notes are written for myself to aid my thinking, learning, and creating. This site is a diverse ecosystem of interlinked notes all evolving at different rates.
Totally Integrated Machine (TIM), by ABoppy. A colorful collection of 25+ topics including Christianity, computer science, gender, mental health, neurodiversity, politics, religion, and trauma.
Since March 2021 I have become very interested in the knowledge management concept of a web of thought so intricate that it creates a second brain. In this quest I realized that my real purpose was to create a Totally Integrated Machine, where the purpose is not just to reflect my first brain, but to augment it.
Your Friend Joel’s Digital Garden, by Joel Hooks. Recommended: My blog is a digital garden, not a blog.
This is my personal site where I drop notes and articles about things that I am interested in. Generally speaking this journal will capture thoughts I have about building bootstrapped business, raising kids, learning, teaching, and my endless obsession with media and gear.
Note-taking, Personal Knowledge Management, Cognition, etc.
Andy’s Working Notes, by Andy Matuschak.
These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up).
Brain.overment.com, by Adam (overment.eth).
Here, I share everything I know. I created this place primarily for myself, so I can easily return to all the materials posted here. At the same time, I thought you might find it all equally valuable to you.
Danny Hatcher, by Danny Hatcher. Writing about cognition, ecological psychology, education, mental health, neuroscience, note-taking, philosophy, system theory, etc. Uses the following note statuses: Written, To Check, Writing, and Waiting.
Journal folder are daily and weekly notes for quick capture and date referencing. Source notes are my sources of information. Working notes are converging concepts into a narratives.
Digital Zen Garden, by Binny VA. Writing about behavior, cognition, learning, mental models, productivity, psychology, etc.
My Digital Garden, My Zettelkasten Note Drawer, A place that holds my thoughts…
Eleanor’s Notes, by Eleanor Konik.
This vault is meant to showcase how I personally use Obsidian to manage a variety of things. My interests are generally in the areas of obscure science & weird history, but I also take notes about software, my fantasy world Verraine, parenting, and gardening. These are working notes, genuine and messy, but I hope you find something valuable here.
Forked My Brain, by Nicole van der Hoeven. Writing about software performance testing, software development, Personal Knowledge Management, Obsidian, productivity, and gaming.
Joel Chan’s working notes, by Joel Chan. Uses note title prefixes: QUE for questions, CLM for claims, EVD for evidence, and PTN for patterns.
Leah Ferguson, by Leah Ferguson. Writing about architecture, design, memory, personal knowledge management, productivity, etc.
Over the summer of 2021, this vault has evolved from a collection of connected thinking and experimental online research notes for grad school into a showcase for the digital tools I use to run my life.
Maggie Delano’s Digital Garden, by Maggie Delano.
I’m actively working on a set of notes around My Workflows. Students or anyone looking career for advice can check out my Unsolicited Career Advice. I’ve also begun fleshing out a few other pages related to my past and current interests: Favorite Problems, Helpful Books, Quantified Self, Inclusive Engineering Design, and Teaching Resources.
Mental Nodes, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
This is a public notebook where I share some of my thoughts on networked thinking, creativity, metacognition, and collective intelligence. It uses bi-directional links, so you can see which pages refer to the one you are currently reading.
Petrichor, by Bryan Jenks.
I have a myriad of interests and like to take notes on many topics some of the more notable topics are zettelkasten, spaced repetition, ADHD, academia, language learning.
Tiina’s garden, by Tiina Peuna. Uses the Sane application. Included in this collection for the navigation experience more so than for the minimal (as of September 2022) content.
This is a growing, indeterminate garden for some of the things I’m reading, thinking about, and working on. It’s a happy mess of personal and professional influences, notes, things I find online, and concepts that stick to the back of my head.
Vlad’s Roam Garden, by Vlad Sitalo. Creator of Roam.Garden. Writing about software code, spaced repetition, cognition, and note-taking.
WebSeitz/wiki, by Bill Seitz. Founder FluxGarden for Digital Garden hosting. A publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden with 17k pages, starting from 2002.
wilde at heart, by jay I. colbert. Writing about aesthetics, classification, cyborgs, embodiment, Logseq, Personal Knowledge Management, rhizomes, zettelkasten, etc.
Software Development and Technology
Chris Biscardi, by Chris Biscardi. Writing about Rust, Serverless, SwiftUI, MDX, GraphQL, and Gatsby software programming.
Double Loop, by Neil Mather.
I’m interested in the politics of technology (and the technology of politics). I’m a fan of free software, free culture, decentralisation and liberatory technology…
The main parts of my home right now are my garden and my stream.
Everything I Know, by Nikita Voloboev. Nearly 100 separate topics including analytics, augmented reality, biology, chemistry, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, operating systems, social networks, and virtual reality.
This garden is quite literally my digital brain. It includes my thoughts, notes and links on topics I care about.
Exobrain, by Karlicoss. Covers biology, computing, health, mind, VR/AR, etc. in minimally formatted Times New Roman text.
Exobrain, or “second brain”, or “brain dump” is something like public wiki where you can keep your bookmarks, notes, ideas and thoughts.
Gwern.net, by Gwern Branwen. About psychology, statistics, and technology. Best known for work on the darknet markets & Bitcoin, blinded self-experiments, dual n-back & spaced repetition, and anime neural networks.
The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference.
Jethro’s Braindump, by Jethro Kuan. The index covers nearly 500 topics with many related to software development.
jzhao.xyz, by Jacky Zhao.
I spend a lot of time here playing, writing, and building out in the open. It’s a little unkempt in places, but I think it gives it a little charm. Currently, I do independent research focused on how we can enable data neutrality on a web dominated by data moats. In my spare time, I create and maintain a number of widely used open-source projects.
Mark Bernstein, by Mark Bernstein. Books read, commentary regarding software and hypertext, Malden Massachusetts politics, Wikipedia politics, food recipes, and details regarding the software that Mark’s company developed.
Mister Chad, by Chad Bennett. Graphic design, web design, creativity, and teaching.
This is an ongoing messy work in progress. It is my attempt at organizing and connecting all the different ideas that interest me. It is my public way of trying to make sense of things. It is my attempt at learning in public. It is going to be spotty, inconsistent, and most definitely incomplete. That’s OK.
mnml’s vault, by mnl. Writing about autism, creativity, computer programming (the bulk of the content), mathematics, and music.
This is a public version of My Obsidian Vault.
Nikola’s Digital Garden, by Nikola Milekic. Writing primarily about politics and democracy, computer science, and mathematics.
You will most certainly find the writing style of some (or all) of these rather strange, and that’s OK. It’s because I didn’t write them with anyone else in mind, but you’re more than welcome to enjoy them as well.
Nitin Pai’s Notes, by Nitin Pai. Works on information age politics, cyber strategy, space power, and maritime strategy.
An experimental vault that is maintained by the Obsidian community. We think of this vault as a Digital garden. This means that the content in our vault is very much a work in progress.
Other Internet, by Toby Shorin. Research topics include crypto philanthropy, the prehistory of DAOs, market-protocol fit, and spatial software.
Other Internet is a decentralized applied research organization. We study and build social technology.
Paul’s Notes, by Paul Bauer. Software development and Personal Knowledge Management.
Rach Smith, by Rach Smith. Notes about books, software development, mothering, productivity, well-being, and work.
Rob’s Hypertext Notebook, by Rob Haisfield. Writing about gamification, product strategy, technology adoption, user retention, etc.
All you need to do is click on what is interesting. This is a special trait of this website — by Writing in hypertext, it is structured for both you and I to explore my thoughts. In a linear piece of writing, all ideas would be sequenced into one narrative. In my hypertext writing, the narrative is emergent and the ideas are associative.
Szymon Kaliski, by Szymon Kaliski.
The system currently contains 146 public notes, a subset of what I use in my personal knowledge management system. Interesting places to start could be collections on: End-User Programming, Future Of Coding, Learning, or Cybernetics.
The Index, by Jeremy Nixon. A collection of 40+ topics including books, decision-making, machine intelligence, productivity, mathematics, and thinking/modeling.
The Living Thing, by Dan MacKinlay. Writing is mostly about machine learning.
Philosophy, Self-Reflection, and Writing
Buster’s Notes, by Buster Benson. A collection of 50+ topics including behavior-change, books, dialogue, projects, self-reflection, self-tracking, and year-in-review.
These are my notes. Basically a collection of links to a small subset of all the things I’ve written that seem worth keeping around, assorted into piles, occassionally reviewed and re-organized into a tower of beliefs, standing the test of time (for now, at least).
sindhu.live, by Sindhu. Reading, writing advice, history, inspiration, weekly notes, etc.
The beauty of a digital garden is the inherent opportunity to go rabbit-holing. Click on any title that catches your fancy and use the backlinks to dive deeper into the site.
The Compendium, by Alex Komoroske.
I love diving into complex problem spaces and distilling insights into essays. Writing an essay takes a ton of time because they are final and unchanging. Many ideas are interrelated and build on each other, and as I write one essay I start organizing thoughts for others. The result is either a) literally 100 Medium draft post outlines collecting dust, or b) bloated kitchen-sink essays that try to do too much. Worse, ideas tend to develop over time as I learn more, meaning that essays from years ago slowly rot and become less relevant to the whole body of essays. The solution is this, a living compendium of developing insights.
The Mindskills Playbook, by George Silverman.
Unlike other books, this is a “live book”: It is made up mostly of independent essays, intended to be read in a sequence you choose, guided by your curiosity and interest. Check the table of contents and, eventually, the hub pages, and see what “strikes your fancy.” That’s your subconscious telling you that you are receptive to and will benefit from reading it. Jump around. Life’s an adventure.
Winnie Lim, by Winnie Lim. Notes, journaling, essays, experiments with the site, library, and poetry.
This website is essentially a repository of my memories, lessons I’ve learnt, insights I’ve discovered, a changelog of my previous selves. Most people build a map of things they have learnt, I am building a map of how I have come to be, in case I may get lost again. Maybe someone else interested in a similar lonely path will feel less alone with my documented footprints.
Perhaps you also have a fascination with digital gardens. If so, I hope that this collection has been both entertaining and mentally engaging. Perhaps you are even inspired to create a digital garden of your own, as I am. If so, I hope that the collection has provided some ideas for how you wish to proceed with your work.
I’d like to know about other exemplary digital gardens to enjoy and learn from. Please suggest in a response.
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