A few weeks ago I read The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield and it really resonated with me. In my mind almost all of what I write on the web is part of my own garden, even though I do that writing using blogging tools that are more stream than garden.

One thing that I would add to idea of a garden or stream is structure. I personally like drilling down into a topic, which is why ever since I first experienced hyperlinks and the web it clicked. My affinity toward structure is also why I find outlines appealing.

Chronology (reverse), archives, and permalinks are structures of blogs that I think distinguish it technologically from “regular” web sites. The informal personal voice of blogs is what distinguishes the blog writing style from other writing styles you see on the web.

And yet, blogs writing is also point in time. One writes a blog post, it enters the stream, and beyond perhaps that first day one rarely, if ever, edits or adds to a blog post.

The ongoing revision of a piece of writing is fundamentally what I think Caulfield means by “the garden.” With that paradigm, I created two “projects”, the first being a web page in which I originally wrote about which Chromebook I was going to buy and then continually revised that page as I learned more up until I made my decision. The second project is a new page in which I am recording my experience with using the Pixelbook.

In both instances I created and maintained those pages using jekyll and offline tools like Drafts and Typora, which I find works very well. However, it feels that a wiki is more in tune with the garden concept which is why I have been dabbling with wikis.

Right now, this whole thing is work in progress. I think I favor the offline ability I have with my jekyll and Netlify set up versus in browser editing required by DokuWiki.