Why I’m Turning My Website Into a Digital Garden!

Before we get started, I just realized that this year is a leap year! Making this a leap post! Just found that tidbit cool and fitting for our topic today!

I haven’t updated you all about my website in a while, last time was when I had transition into Cloudflare Pages and moved into a newer version of Jekyll and the minima theme gem.

This time I want to share some plans I have for the future of my website and what that means for you!

First off, while minima theme has served me well I have grown to see that it doesn’t fit what I want for a theme. minima is very simple and minimalistic by design which is the reason I picked it but there’s a few features that I would really like missing, for example:

• There’s no option to add a logo, you can however tinker around with CSS and HTML and add it that way but is not a simple or a easy solution.

• There’s not a natively built-in search function, which for what I want to transform this website into needs.

• No native support for header images, while not a necessity is a nice to have feature.

While I love the simplicity of the theme, it is just too simple for me. I want minimalism. But I do want to be able to express myself as well!

This bring us to minimal-mistakes! A minimal theme but with way more features built-in than minima. It has everything I ever want or need!

A search function, built-in logo support, header images, and not to mention a way more fitting theme for a digital garden! Plus it is well documented unlike minima, so a web dev newbie like me can get behind it!

But I bet your thinking; “That’s all well and good but what’s this about a digital garden?”. So for those of you uninformed I’ll be glad to filled you in!

A digital garden is much like any other website but focused on creating and fostering ideas or I guess you could say planting and nurturing ideas!

It focuses on linking ideas together and curation  unlike a blog where old posts fall to the wayside for newer posts, posts can be evergreen and be updated with new links and info over time.

Instead of scrolling a feed you’ll land on a homepage of feature articles, posts or notes curated by the writer and when you click one you’ll noticed that they bidirectionally linked, a post can lead other posts like and endless rabbit hole of ideas.

Another boon of a digital garden is that is not just a blog your not limited in what you want to curated and showcase in this space!

For example you can have a list of games you have played, your favorites, what are you currently playing and more! You can engage with your audience in more ways than one.

In a nutshell a digital garden is personal space online that you make your own with whatever interests you!

So what does that mean for this website? Well, nothing much will change since even before I knew about this concept I wanted to make more than just a blog and create a place of the Internet for myself.

A portal to my world as it were, In fact that’s what the name comes from! My very own dimension online but it also serves a double meaning, I wanted this dimension to be a place of learning as well this is why about half of my posts are guides or tutorials.

And that fits perfectly with digital gardens since they place a huge deal on public learning. So if anything I will just add more content and deeper insight into my interests.

I’ll still have a page with chronologically sorted posts for those who want to read the latest and for feed readers. But I will slowly put more emphasis on curation and if your looking for something in particular you can always search for it!

I also want to add a microblog to this digital garden as well! I just recently left cohost! Because I barely used it, and it looks too much like social media that I grew to despise nowadays. But with it, I lose out on its microblogging aspects, so I’m making my own!

The plan is to write my thoughts daily that later can become full on posts or articles! Making the writing process much easier.

“So when will we expect these changes?” You might ask? Well not anytime soon, I haven’t even began tinkering with minimal-mistakes yet! Is going to take a while why I finished customizing the theme and making sure is well polished. But you can expect it this year at least.

This will be a big leap for this website and is next real evolution and I hope you are excited as much as I am for it! For now though expect a new post mid March!