MTmtsolitary·Jan 3, 2025
In BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogsMaggieAppleton
digital-gardeners
JavaScript2020–2025
MaggieAppleton / digital-gardeners
digital-gardeners
Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.9KGitHub stars
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What it is
Resources, links, projects, and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes on the public interwebs
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-05-13 21:06:13 UTC to 2025-01-03 10:34:24 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesThe website's theme and philosophy revolve around digital gardening. I am in the process of building one for myself, and I use this list as a source of inspiration: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners#digital-...
In 3D in CSSPermanence is my concern with the indie blog hosting services mentioned here (bearblog, prose.sh, nicheless.blog)
Also, because you already have a lot of the content, maybe you don't need a blog? what about a "digital garden" ?
What is a digital garden? -> https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
Tools (easy options included) -> https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
If you have your content in a note-taking app like obsidian, there is even simple tutorials on how to freely publish it with all those precious "multiple tags per category", all in one go.
In Ask HN: What are the best minimalist, text-centric blogging platforms?https://maggieappleton.com/ for her take on a digital garden. She also compiled more below [0] if opening your thought process to the public is your thing (adopting the concept actually got me to add more structure to my serious notes and actually post more)
https://brianlovin.com/writing/how-my-website-works because of how in-depth he went with hosting his notes, bookmarks, and other projects.
https://wattenberger.com/ for its reactivity/place for her d3.js experiments.
and here is a general collection of dope blog additions: https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/04/cool-things-people-do-w...
My overall advice is unless you're a designer flexing your skills is to focus less on the design and more on the actual writing! The internet is littered with the emaciated husks of nice good looking sites hosting nary an entry beyond "How I Made My New
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Blog With X"
[0] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
There’s a term digital garden and personal wiki that might help you find this kind of thing.
Here’s a curated list: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
Includes resources on how to start your own.
Buster Benson is probably my favourite one https://notes.busterbenson.com/
In Ask HN: Can I see your digital notes?> Brandon Toner on Twitter[3] even introduced me to a hashtag for them ...
Is it #digitalgarden?
> I believe the most important question regarding personal knowledge bases is how to make them social.
AFAIK note taking apps often have a feature to share notes, if that counts, e.g., Obsidian (view-only), Roam (view and edit), Notion (view, edit, and comment), and so on. With sharing and comments enabled, you can even use Google Docs as your PKB (some people actually do this), given that you don't need fancy features like bi-directional links.
Just like regular blogs, some gardeners also implement a social protocol called Webmention [1]. It's more like a pingback in WordPress than a collaboration tool though.
> A good shared knowledge base would by contrast also resemble Twitter -- but more organized, more navigable.
I would love to see this
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implemented in existing apps. The current solutions I know either involve 3rd party plugins (e.g., hypothes.is), or you have to self-hosted it yourself (e.g., cactus.chat, based on Matrix protocol).
Another alternative, which I learned from visiting other gardeners [2], is that you can link the edit button in your note to a GitHub PR. It's not friendly to non-developers who visit your garden, but this is better than nothing IMO.
> In practice the personal knowledge bases I've seen look much more like silos.
5 months ago there is a Show HN about a decentralized knowledge graph called Agora [3]. The cool thing is, everyone is part of one large knowledge graph, which means nodes (notes) from multiple users can be aggregated around [[topic]]. I hope the project is still alive..
ps. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.. I only started researching on this topic recently to create my own PKB (I literally published my first note couple days ago [4]).
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
[2] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573523
[4] https://arata.page/notes/Web/Safari/WWDC21/
There is a really fantastic movement of people creating "digital gardens", collections of notes and ideas and posts that can be much less formal than a traditional blog. They're very fun to create, tinker with, and to explore. Check out mine here: https://mtsolitary.com as an example, or see this great curated list: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners.
There are some tools being created in this space but a lot of it is still roll-your-own. Github Pages and Jekyll (or even better, Hugo) is a good way to get started, there's plenty of simple tutorials that can get you a site up and running. And in terms of control over your future: everything in the end is just Markdown files that you can pick up and take with you wherever you go :)
In Small B Blogging (2018)It's only for presentation. He writes in Bear on MacOS and use his script to make backlinks https://github.com/andymatuschak/Bear-Markdown-Export . He made a video presenting how he works, should be somewhere on YT.
But if you're asking specifically about that website source code then yes, he was asked about it. He didn't publish it. There are some alternatives: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
In How I read books: a guide on how to learnDigital-gardeners: Resources and ideas for gardeners tending their digital notes
3 points · Open discussion