[Go Make Things] On digital gardens (and being a whole person on the web)

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Today, I wanted to talk about digital gardens, being a whole person on the web, and some changes I think I'm going to be making to my various websites.

Let's dig in!

tl;dr: I'm considering merging my ADHD stuff and personal stuff into Go Make Things and my members area. You can read the specifics here, or read the whole way through to understand the what and why.

What's a digital garden?

For years, I've been obsessed with the idea of the digital garden.

If the modern blog focuses on reverse-chronological streams of content, a digital garden is more like a wiki, where information is sorted by topic and importance, with lots of cross-linking.

Digital gardens tend to feel like the weird web of 90s.

They're less concerned with being narrowly focused on one topic. Instead, they tend to feature what Maggie Appleton calls intercropping, where lots of different topics coexist in the same space and sometimes grow alongside each other.

As someone with ADHD, that's particularly appealing to me as well!

I've tried to do this a few times

I've tried to incorporate the digital gardening ethos into my site at least twice in the past.

The first time, I felt like mixing my dev and non-dev content made selling courses harder, and capitalism won. The second time, I spun up a separate standalone site inside, which I then proceeded to neglect.

I have a tough time compartmentalizing.

I am all of me all the time, and splitting myself up into "web dev Chris" and "ADHD Chris" and "gardening and TTRPGs Chris" just doesn't feel particularly natural. I don't like it.

The Garden and the Stream

One of the things that I always got a big hung up on with digital gardening was this idea that rather than publishing "finished articles," you maintain an article on a topic that grows and evolves over time.

This created some weird blocks in my brain…

I think by writing, publishing, and getting responses from others.
My blog posts never feel "finished." They just my "in the moment" thoughts.
How would folks even learn when an existing thing had been updated? It wouldn't trigger an RSS update.

A regularly updated page on my site on, say Array.prototype methods, wouldn't have the same kind of "let me think about this aloud" cycle that an article building on some concepts over time, would.

But then I learned about the garden and the stream.

Streams are blog posts, social media posts, podcast episodes, and so on. Basically all the stuff I do now. The garden is where you capture the good stuff that comes out of streams that you want to preserve in a easy-to-reference place.

And yesterday, I realized that I already have both.

This site, this article and others like it, are the stream. And my members portal is my garden. It's where the stuff I publish in my articles gets cleaned up and preserved.

I was fretting about a non-problem, as my over-thinking brain is wont to do!

(There's a newer take on this that includes the idea of "campfires", places with two-way conversation like a Discord community.)

A unified garden

So where am I going with all of this?

I'm considering merging my ADHD stuff and personal stuff into Go Make Things and my members area.

My ADHD articles would become comingled in with the rest of my articles here.
My ADHD podcast would get merged into the Go Make Things podcast.
My ADHD courses and tools would get added to the my members toolkit.
My resources around TTRPGs and druidry and gardening and life stuff would also get added to the members toolkit.
My Discord communities would get merged together into one space with some appropriate channels for topics as people see fit.

The big driver behind this is that I want to be my whole self in all that I do.

And by splitting my attention across platforms, none of them get the love they deserve. Merging things means I can write more about ADHD and more about non-technical stuff.

I'm feeling pretty good about this, but it's a drastic move, so I'm going to sleep on it for a few days.

If you have thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

Like this? A Go Make Things membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content.

Cheers,
Chris

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