A Digital Garden

I spent a couple of days now questioning how and what I write after reading a post from Richard Haines. In his post he mentioned how he stumbled across the Digital Garden idea.

Richard’s post led me to Chris Biscardi’s thoughts on that and in turn Joel Hooks and his thoughts on it.

Both Joel and Chris mention a post from Amy Hoy (who I’ve just realised I follow on Twitter) in the post Amy talks about the How the Blog Broke the Web

All of this was quite thought provoking!

Paradigm shift

I decided that where I write about what I learn doesn’t have to be a job, something else to add to my current cognitive load. It should be a place where I do things for me, for future me.

The content here is primarily for me to document what I’ve learned. If it helps anyone else then that’s a massive plus, also, you’re welcome. 🐱

Side effects

This shift in thinking triggered a lot of activity here!

I spent some time cleaning up the site, I removed all unnecessary cover images.

I felt that this really didn’t add anything to the content, the images were unrelated and added nothing and were only really there for social sharing to use the Open Graph images.

So, the posts folder on this site before and after I purged all the assets:

That was ok, however, I’ve now got the posts folder down to 4.3mb after Moving Large Markdown Assets to a CDN and the project builds 25% faster!

There’s still social sharing cards, now they are generated with a serverless function, which was another great learning experience!

That is another thing to come out of this paradigm shift and how I’m going to do things in my Digital Garden, a site that builds 25% faster than before.

I’ll go into more detail on this in the upcoming post Moving from Now to Netlify then back to Now, I think the title explains a lot of what the content will be on that one.

The way it’s going to be

So this is going to work with the notion that I’ll write about things as they come to me, add them here and add to them periodically as and when needed.

So far there are five posts that have come out of this, I unpublished everything but soon put them back behind a published flag as there were a lot of half arsed posts, some just a title and a link.

If you’re reading this and wondering why there’s a post titled Shaving the Yak! with the total content of one sentence and two links! Sorry.

A theme switch

Sometimes migrating all your local assets to a CDN and adding a theme switcher on your projects can generate quite a lot of ideas and you can learn a lot from it.

This site now has styled scrollbars, serverless OG images and a theme switcher all thanks to me reading one post!

I’ve never been so busy with taking notes and documenting how I’ve done a thing or what I’ve learned after doing that thing.

Conclusion

I’m still in the midst of what I’m going to do, but I am doing away with the .blog TLD, I did like the idea of an .io TLD but have since found that it’s origins have quite a sinister background that I really want no part of.

I do like the idea of the site’s name and I guess I had grand ideas of having guests come and write posts on here too. Let’s face it though, anyone doing that is going to use their own platform.

I’m more than likely going to move all these posts back to my own personal site and share things from there.

There’s going to be a lot of work involved in doing that and right now I want to focus more on getting ideas out of my head, and somewhere else (here) so I can get on with other tasks and leave the ideas to build and peculate.

Get it down then get it done!