Streams - For me this is twitter and is more than enough stream for now.
Campfires - For me this is the blog here (and more broadly the blogosphere that I read and engage with). Room to grow here but generally I’m satisfied here.
Gardens - This is where there’s a gap for me personally. No place to store and evolve deeper longer-term thinking. Many of my friends have gravitated to Are.na but I just can’t get it to work for me.
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
A space for collecting the dots
This one might be the most important. Creative research is all about collecting the dots. It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see. And we can only hold a tiny number of things in our brains at once. So a space for collecting (and organizing) the dots is a crucial foundation for thinking, creativity and more:
But ideas aren’t summoned from nowhere: they come from raw material, other ideas or observations about the world. Hence a two-step creative process: collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.
Firstly - apparently, folders and files is the “best in class” tool (better than tags and search) for personal information management This gem came via the Ink and Switch article linked above. :
Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering personal information management research that these other methods that work best for public information management don’t work as well for personal information management.
Secondly - I write this blog on Github pages using Jekyll - aka using folders and files!
So what if I could build the digital garden I want right here using Jekyll using nothing more than folders and text files?
There are a few benefits:
Files and folders feels like it has a long shelf-life. If I’m building this for the long-term (and I think I am) then I want a format I can back-up, archive and re-publish in the future independent of platform.
Using files and folders allows me to drag and drop files into my wiki with zero authoring - CSV, pdf, png and txt files all are hosted and contained gracefully
It’s robust since I can back up this wiki folder to any service, dropbox, Google Drive, Github, etc.
The wiki folder is made of a series of folders - each one containing any kind of files.
Markdown files are treated as pages
Image files are displayed as thumbnails with a link to the image, with the filename displayed to store any kind of title you want
PDf, CSV, txt files and anything else are displayed with a link to the file.
The “magic” comes from each wiki folder having an index.html file which handles all of the display by using a custom layout wikiindex
The root wiki page loops through all the files to create a master index automatically. Code here.
Of course, the meat of the wiki is contained in note files which are just markdown files so easily portable. I intentionally designed the wiki to not rely on a ton of front-matter for portability and simplicity. To do this I added a default layout to wiki files in the config file.
It’s not all about layout though - it’s about presentation too. I added a single flag to the wikiindex frontmatter for “expand” to be true or false that displays the notes either fully expanded or as simple links. My parenting wiki is an example of the notes expanded, while my drafts folder is just a list of links because it’s long.
Finally, where I have a long list of links I added the ability for individual notes to be “pinned” to the top of the page to ensure more important or frequently-used links are easy to find.