How to set up your own digital garden

Yesterday, I wrote about why I set up a digital garden. Today, I wanted to share a bit more about exactly how I set it up, as well as my current workflow for sharing notes. I’m only a couple weeks into tending my digital garden, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my workflow evolved and changed over time. But here’s what I’m doing right now.

I’m not going to get super technical in this post, mostly because I don’t think I need to—more knowledgeable folks than me have already written out the exact steps to do this.

The purpose of this post is to point you to the instructions, talk about how I set mine up, and discuss my current workflow, since that’s something I did have to do some thinking about.

Technical information

If you’re considering making your own digital garden, it’s very easy to do—you don’t even need to know how to code. My digital garden was created using a template; check out this step-by-step guide explaining how to set this up from scratch. Though I followed these instructions on YouTube to set it up (there’s also a text version of the instructions), which were even simpler.

It was speedy to set up and it was free. The garden is hosted on GitHub, so I’m not even paying a hosting fee.

Okay, technically I paid $8 to Namecheap to get the domain name of chrisdigitalgarden.com. But I didn’t have to do that. I could’ve just stayed with the Netlify subdomain. But I love collecting domain names, apparently.

Alright, that’s not actually why I bought the domain. I purchased it as a hedge against link rot. If I ever move to a different solution for hosting this garden, I want to be able to keep the same domain name (rather than linking to everything under the Netlify subdomain and then breaking those links). That way, I can link to this from my blog without worrying about creating a trail of dead links. (You know, as long as I keep paying the $8ish/year subscription for the domain.)

There are plenty of other ways to set one up! For example, this post by Tom Critchlow talks about making a digital garden using Jekyll and GitHub, though it’s not quite right for my purposes because of how I use Obsidian.

My workflow

Like I mentioned yesterday, I use Obsidian for my notes, which are all formatted and stored as markdown files.

I could have launched this digital garden using Obsidian Publish, but that costs $8/month. I already pay not-insignificant monthly hosting fees for my website and podcast, so I wasn’t exactly eager to add to that.

Also, I wanted a more manual solution. Though you can apparently pick and choose which notes you want to make public when using Obsidian Publish, that just felt like . . . too much room for error . . . for me, since I have plenty of personal notes in my vault.

Instead, I went with this approach:

I made a folder in my Obsidian vault called “evergreen-to share”
When I’ve cleaned a note up enough that I feel good about sharing it, I move the markdown file there.
When I’m ready to update the garden, I sort that folder by date modified, identify which notes I’ve changed or added since the last update, and then copy them into the local GitHub folder.
I push out the update using the GitHub desktop app.

And that’s it! Very easy. It took me under an hour to set up my digital garden.

A plea to fellow paranormal researchers: break free of walled gardens and build your own digital gardens

Earlier this year, one of my favorite thinkers, sci-fi author Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.”

Enshittification is the process of a platform destroying itself. It often goes like this: the platform initially seems great, so users sign up, then it shafts its users in favor of attracting business users, then it screws businesses over to draw in advertisers, and then the whole thing devolves into an unusable pile of mush.

The term has caught on because it’s so perfect for our time. (You can read about it on Doctorow’s blog or hear about it on his podcast.)

Many of the largest platforms are currently in particularly mushy stages. (Twitter comes to mind most readily, but it certainly isn’t the only one. Pretty much everyone knows that Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon are garbage as well.)

One of many problems with enshittification is that when a social media platform implodes, users lose a lot, from the social connections that they made on the platform to the content that they created. (Ditto with if, say, a platform suddenly decides to ban or delete your account, something that seems to happen to users with alarming frequency.)

If you create your content inside a walled garden, you don’t control it. Social media algorithms allow people to potentially get more exposure. But for the most part, you’re stuck making content for free for a platform that can just delete it all or block people from seeing it at a whim.

Doctorow compares the success of some lucky folks on social media to the phenomenon of someone walking around a county fair with a giant teddy bear. All of the games in the midway are rigged, so no one’s winning the grand prize unless someone lets them. But the thing is, if you let one person get the prize, a big ol’ teddy bear, they’ll walk around all day with that bear, advertising the games. People will see that and believe that the games are winnable. After all, that person won the teddy bear, so why not me?

The teddy bear, like success on social media, is just part of the trap.

By the time a platform is enshittified, the teddy bears have already been handed out. Any surplus or reward that was gonna be given to users has been sucked away. The platform essentially becomes an attention mine for ad bucks.

The implications of a few giant corporations controlling so much of the content that we create—so much of the fabric of our lives—are chilling.

In a recent issue of the Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick writes about a deceased friend’s tweets, which, according to statements from Twitter about inactive accounts, might soon be deleted. He describes his sadness about potentially losing that last connection to a lost friend.

He writes:

I’ll be realistic here. I don’t think we should expect every company to keep our content forever, but I also don’t think they should get to unilaterally shrink the internet because they’re tired of being responsible for its upkeep. The internet shouldn’t be a handful of company towns that can pull up their stakes and leave when the data mine is tapped.

Broderick also talks about how someone discovered that Twitter was un-deleting people’s deleted posts.

So, within the walled gardens of social media, you have neither a right to be remembered nor a right to be forgotten.

It’s hard to say what rights we have at all.[^1] That’s unacceptable, even if you’re just online to follow friends and family.

But it becomes a whole nother thing when you’re on social media sharing your creative and intellectual work.

I’d like to address this post to fellow paranormal researchers, but really I’m talking to everyone who creates content and posts it only to social media.

We’ve been taught that our work is and should be ephemeral, grist for the content mill that keeps social media worth going back to. Posting to social media has its purpose: communication. However, it’s also sucked in content that once would have been archived on personal blogs—much of that content is extremely valuable and deserves to be shared more widely.

But instead it’s trapped inside the walled gardens of social media, subject to the whim of big tech companies and potentially hidden from people to free up more space for advertisements on your followers’ feeds.

Why more paranormal researchers should tend their own digital gardens

This week, I’ve been writing about digital gardens, which are of course distinct from the walled gardens of social media (despite the similar terminology).

A digital garden is a low-lift, casual collection of personal notes that are published online. It’s a constant work in progress, a place to link your thinking, develop your thoughts, and learn in public.

Yesterday, I wrote about how you can easily set one up for yourself online.

I’ve enjoyed poking around in existing digital gardens, but many of them focus heavily on tech and personal knowledge management. Those are just two of many subjects that I’m interested in, and I’d be thrilled if more paranormal folks set up digital gardens for their own research.

Right now, I learn about what people are researching primarily through random social media posts.

Which is fine, sort of.

I think I’ve already established some of the issues with social media. But in addition to those, research posted to social media becomes

hard to search for and almost impossible to track back down (especially when they live in self-destructing posts like Instagram stories),
difficult to cite,
hidden inside walled gardens, which makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t use the platforms you do. (I’m talking about corporate social media and setting aside interoperable social media like the fediverse here, to be clear.)

Disappearing posts

On social media, if someone takes down a post, it’s gone.

When I do research for my podcast and blog, I often stumble upon old blog posts that contain links to other, dead blogs. But I can easily plug that dead link into the Wayback Machine and access the page there.

But what do you do if a social media post is taken down? I don’t think social media is archived the same way that blog posts are. (Not as far as I could discern.)

On top of that, you can’t just search the Wayback Machine using keywords. You need a specific URL to plug in.

In a world with fewer blogs (since they’ve mostly been replaced by social media), there are fewer places to find outgoing links to interesting content. Which means that there are fewer breadcrumb-like dead links that can lead to amazing archived defunct sites.

So that means that when a social media post goes down, it’s probably gone for good. (Unless that person was a public figure and people were screen grabbing everything they posted, something that probably won’t be the case for folks doing paranormal research.)

Citation difficulties

I often see interesting paranormal tidbits on social media while I’m in a half-glazed doomscroll trance. Then can’t remember where I saw it, who did which experiment, or the content of exactly what they did.

Or even worse, sometimes I think of something and can’t remember if it’s one of my own original ideas or something that I saw half paying attention while scrolling on social media. And then searching doesn’t surface it, because of the severe limitations when it comes to searching social media.

But you know what is easier to search, and what gets archived? A blog. And if you have a set of bookmarks or an RSS feed, it becomes easier to check the places that you know you read and search them.

I’m now at the point where I find myself taking notes on social media posts so I can (hopefully) properly cite other people’s research. Which, again, is fine, but it’s not a long-term solution for archiving the brilliant thoughts of other researchers. It’s just a way for me to have a skimpy record of the tidbits that interested me.

Paranormal research has value

I would really like to see more people treating their research and experiences with the respect they deserve, archiving them in blogs or even on something lower effort like a digital garden.

I don’t fault anyone for keeping their work within the walled gardens of social media.

It’s free and easy. We’re encouraged to do so.

In fact, we’re actively discouraged and punished for sharing external links on platforms like Instagram. So if you set up shop outside of a walled garden, good luck getting people to actually see it.

I started promoting my blog on Instagram, posting stories that contained links to posts. Based on my back-of-the-envelope math, my Instagram story views went down by 30-70% as a result.

As an experiment, I stopped posting links and promoting my writing, and my story views went back up to more “normal” levels.

Though even on my best days, an extremely small percentage of my 1,200 or so followers even saw my stories and posts.

In fact, that’s why I stopped posting Instagram Reels. I know they’d help with growth. But I got too pissed off at being forced to do all this extra work creating content for a platform (for, again, no compensation and no promise that it’d actually net me more followers, or that any new followers would actually see my stuff).

It’s frustrating. So many of us are on social media to share the cool stuff we’re creating elsewhere. But then platforms disincentivize sharing the actual creative work and only (sometimes) rewards us for creating whatever content fits best into their ever-changing roadmap of which features they’re pushing.

Setting up your digital garden, blog, or website

Again, I talked about how I set up my digital garden yesterday. You can set up a website really easily, and for free.

The method I used—Github for hosting, Netlify as a CDN, and a premade Jekyll template—is an easy and free (or very low cost) way to have a place for your notes online. And you really don’t need to have any tech savvy to do it.

You could also set up a website on Neocities, a charming callback to Geocities that allows people to create free (or cheap, if you want to bring your own domain name) static sites.

There are other free and cheap options, like using Hugo and Github or setting up a Write Freely instance.

If you write about weird stuff, you can reach out to the lovely people at Liminal Earth, who already operate a Write Freely instance for people who want to blog about weird things.

And I haven’t even talked about ways of building website like Wordpress (which I used to use), Ghost (which I currently use), and the many others that exist out there.

All of this to say: there are many, many different ways to create a home for your paranormal research online that isn’t hidden within a social media walled garden.

And if blogging is too heavy of a lift, there are more casual options like digital gardening, where you can share less formed, more fluid thoughts.

If you’re eager to learn more about building a non-social media home for yourself online and things like POSSE (publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere, which is what I do for this blog), check out IndieWeb for additional ideas and information.

Also, if you do set up your own blog, remember to include an RSS feed link alongside all of your social links, so that way your readers can choose to get all of your posts via their RSS readers, versus whatever the spotty social media algorithms decide to show them.

Since the surge in social media walled gardens’ popularity and the demise of Google Reader a decade ago, RSS feeds have become less popular. But they’re still an amazing way to follow your favorite creators, and I think they’re poised for a comeback.

I want to see your digital garden

Anyway, that’s my impassioned plea for fellow paranormal researchers to share and archive their work on platforms that they own and that anyone can access. Though I’m sure this won’t be the last time that I grouse about this topic.

If you set up a digital garden because of any of my posts about it, please let me know! I’d love to see other folks’ digital gardens. Especially digital gardens created by other paranormal researchers. Ditto if you set up a blog. Send me that RSS feed and I’ll add it to my RSS reader!

Read my other blog posts about digital gardens:

[^1] I know the GDPR is a thing, but I live in the states, and I hear that the ways in which things have been made GDPR compliant have been . . . a whole non-ideal process that I’m not going to get into here.

Digital gardens, zettlekasten, and paranormal research

How and why I’m sharing my in-progress research notes

Last week, I wrote about how I set up a digital garden to share my research, but I didn’t go into a ton of detail about what that is, why I made it, and how I set it up. To remedy that, let’s talk about some of my favorite subjects: research, personal knowledge management, and digital gardens.

I only recently learned about the concept of digital gardening, though it looks like it’s been floating around in more techie corners of the internet since 2018 or so. But it’s one of those things where as soon as I learned about it, my response was, wow, this is so great; I can’t believe this isn’t more common!

What is a digital garden?

A digital garden is essentially a personal wiki full of notes. It’s created by and for yourself, even it’s public.

The idea is that you can share your ideas while developing them. If all goes well, you’ll develop your thoughts more than you might have in a private notetaking system. You might even get helpful feedback on your ideas from people who visit the garden.

That’s why it’s couched in the language of tending a garden: you’re always pruning and adding things, and people can visit and hang out. But it’s still a private garden, something that you created for yourself and are sharing just because you want to.

So there isn’t the same expectation of Creating Content for Consumption™. We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as businesses and brands (whether or not we make money from our creative work), which is absurd and unhelpful when it comes to learning and developing ideas. So the digital garden is a nice alternative way to share reflections online.

A ton of people have written eloquent, intelligent things about digital gardens. This is a great definition of a digital garden, from Joel Hooks’ blog. It’s all about learning in public:

The phrase “digital garden” is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.

I also liked these proposed digital garden terms of service, which go into depth into some of the philosophy and thinking behind digital gardens. (Last week, when I drafted this post, that page was up, but it seems to have been taken down, so I shared the archived version.)

MIT Technology review published a nice writeup of digital gardens back in 2020, and I loved this summary of the ethos behind them:

These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter. Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.

About my digital garden

You can check out my digital garden at the extremely creative URL chrisdigitalgarden.com.

The whole thing will always, of course, be a work in progress, but it’s especially no-frills right now.

For example, I really need to add some topic navigation so you can access notes through means other than clicking on a recently updated note and then hopping around using backlinks and the graph that visualizes all of my notes. And I haven’t done any tinkering with the look and feel of the place.

I won’t be sharing all of my notes in the digital garden. My zettlekasten is relatively new (less than a year old), so I still have fewer than 2,000 notes in there. But, in contrast, I’ve currently shared fewer than 100 notes in my digital garden. My planned workflow is to share things as I clean up and develop my “permanent” or “evergreen” notes.

If you want my more refined (though nevertheless ever-evolving) thoughts, they’ll still live on my podcast or these blog posts, of course.

The digital garden will be my rough notes.

They’re written for me, first and foremost, but I’ve decided to share them with the public to

force myself to take better, more rigorous notes and revisit them often, and
share what I’m learning about with fellow researchers.

If you decide to reference any of my research, feel free—just attribute it to me.

Since the notes are written for myself first and other audiences second, you can expect to find plenty of broken links to unshared notes, bits that may make sense to no one but myself, typos, and other mistakes.

That’s all as it should be—my goal with the garden learn in public, and I’m always refining my thoughts and ideas. Though that’s my aim with this blog as well, I expressly write these posts for an audience, which isn’t really true with my garden of notes.

Look out for the next few blog posts, where I’ll go into a bit more detail about why and how I set up the digital garden.

Tending the garden: digital gardening goals

Excerpt

I recently set up a digital garden to share some of my in-progress research notes. Yesterday, I wrote about what a digital garden is. Today, I want to delve into my goals for the garden.

My notetaking methods

As a paranormal researcher, I use the zettlekasten method of taking notes. Essentially, zettlekasten is an atomized, non-linear notetaking style that encourages you to develop original thoughts and make novel connections. For more information, I recommend the book How to Take Smart Notes

I recently set up a digital garden to share some of my in-progress research notes. Yesterday, I wrote about what a digital garden is. Today, I want to delve into my goals for the garden.

My notetaking methods

I keep my personal knowledge database in Obsidian, a free notetaking software that works from locally-stored markdown files. That means your notes aren’t locked into proprietary software and you can take ’em with you if you ever decide to leave.

If you’re looking to “build a second brain,” Obsidian is a great place to do that. I do have my gripes with it; I’m really not a fan of its search engine, for example. But overall, it’s been a huge boon to my research.

My problems

I was thrilled to come across the idea of digital gardens. When I first started blogging weekdaily a couple months ago, one of my main goals was to help keep myself honest.

I do a ton of research and writing that I don’t share, and I do a lot of thinking that I don’t write down. The two main culprits there are laziness and perfectionism. Daily blogging helps with both of those.

I’ve committed to getting something out every weekday. So I’ve gotta write something down about what I’m working on or thinking about. And I’ve gotta publish it, even if it doesn’t feel “done” or as polished as I’d like it to be.

It’s been working well. But it hasn’t quite solved a related problem, which has to do with the raw material that ends up becoming blog posts.

My creative workflow

Right now, my ideal creative workflow looks something like this:

Stray thoughts/interesting tidbits I find while reading/listening/watching things –> fleeting notes (URL with a cryptic note, quotes pasted from books, etc.) –> permanent/evergreen, fleshed out notes put into my own words with my insights added –> blog posts –> podcast episode scripts

I’ve been following zettlekasten practices since August 2022, though I often find myself slacking off in the step where I’m supposed to make permanent, evergreen notes.

That’s arguably the most important part, so it’s not great that it’s also where I drop the ball.

My goals

For zettlekasten, you’re supposed to put concepts into your own words and synthesize your thoughts based on what you’ve read. That’s the real secret sauce of the method. (Which I’ve written about before.)

By the time you’re done taking notes, you’ve already done the research and a lot of the writing for whatever you create, be they blog posts, articles, podcast episodes, or books.

But, especially when you’re taking notes on the fly, it’s easy to paste a quote of what you’re reading into your notes and move on. It’s better than not making a note of what you’ve read, but it prevents your notes from being as useful as they could be.

That’s where this digital garden comes in.

My goal is to have a regular (weekly or weekly-ish) workflow of revising and refining notes, and then uploading them into this digital garden. I want this to be an impetus for me to clean up my notes and stop being lazy. I’ve been doing it for a couple weeks now, and so far I’m definitely seeing an improvement.