Digital Garden

A digital garden is a personal online space for interconnected, evolving ideas. Not a blog of finished articles — a living knowledge system you tend over time.

Topography, not timeline

Most sites organize content by date: newest post at the top, oldest buried below. A digital garden is organized by connection. You navigate by following links between related ideas, not by scrolling a feed.

Notes aren't published once and forgotten. They're revised, expanded, and linked to new material as your thinking develops.

Learning in public

Digital gardens embrace work in progress. Notes can be half-formed thoughts, early hypotheses, or rough drafts. Some gardeners mark maturity explicitly — seedling for new ideas, budding for developing ones, evergreen for stable knowledge.

The point isn't polish. It's the accumulation of thinking made visible.

A brief history

The term traces to 1998. Mike Caufield's 2015 keynote "The Garden and the Stream" revived it and framed the core tension: the garden (a space for connected, evolving knowledge) versus the stream (a timeline of updates that disappears as it flows).

An accessible overview: A brief history of digital gardens — Maggie Appleton

Your garden lives on your computer

This is the part that matters most. Your notes are Markdown files on your computer. trip2g reads them and publishes them as a website. The files never move — they stay exactly where you put them.

You own the garden. trip2g is the gate.

If trip2g shuts down, your notes are still there. If you switch tools, you take your files and go. No export, no migration, no asking permission.

This is what Digital Sovereignty means in practice.

How it works with Obsidian

Obsidian is built for this. Every note links to others via [[wikilinks]]. The graph view shows the shape of your knowledge. Bidirectional links surface connections you didn't plan.

trip2g publishes that structure directly. Readers navigate your garden the same way you built it — by following links, not scrolling dates.