Digital Gardening Tools and Resources
This collection of apps, tools and articles is here to help you learn more about digital gardening. Ideally, it’s here to help you start your own garden.
What is “digital gardening”?
A garden is something inbetween a personal blog and a wiki. It’s a collection of evolving notes, essays, and ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – posts are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - posts can be published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal “blogs” we’re used to encountering on the web.
See the Theory, Philosophy, and Navel-gazing section for more on the ‘what’ of gardens.
Gardening Tools
Building a Public Garden
- Roam Research - A personal notes system for interconnected thought
- See the following resources for converting your private garden in Roam to a public garden:
- Roam Garden a service that does all the setup for you based on JSON export
- Gatsby Theme Garden Gatsby theme that supports using Roam as a source
- Roam-to-Garden Jekyll based converter for your Roam Data
- See the following resources for converting your private garden in Roam to a public garden:
- Obsidian - a Roam-like knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. Also allows you to publish selections of your graph to the open web.
- TiddlyWiki - A no-code personal wiki system
- Gitbook
- React-Notion - allows you to publish a React-based website sources from your Notion notes - “Notion as a CMS”
- Gatsby Brain Theme - Roam-like bidirectional links in Gatsby.js
- Gatsby Andy Theme
- Gatsby Theme Garden - A set of tools to build a digital garden with Gatsby.js. Pull data from Roam Research or markdown.
- Simply Jekyll - A Jekyll theme with bidirectional links, sidenotes, and transclusion
- Digital Garden Jekyll Template - A simple, clean jekyll template with bi-directional links
- Jekyll-Bonsai - A modern jekyll theme for semantically inclined digital gardeners.
- Jekyll Garden - Clean Jekyll theme supoorting bidirectional links.
- Eleventy Garden - A minimal template with backlinks, built in Eleventy
- Foam - Roam-like personal note management and publishing system built inside VSCode
- Foamy NextJS - Basic Foam + NextJS with MDX starter for building a digital garden
- Dendron - A structured note taking tool that merges the freedom of Roam-like linking with the order hierarchical organization
- Hyperdraft - Turns plain markdown notes into a website as you write. Easy to setup and doesn’t require builds or deploys.
- Neuron - Managing and publishing system for plain-text Zettelkasten-style notes.
- Innos Notes – Features include parallel pages, content blocks, and knowledge graph visualisations.
- Trilium Notes - A hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.
Building a Private Garden
- Bangle.io - A simple, markdown-based notetaking app that runs locally on your machine.
- Org Roam - non-hierarchical note-taking with org-mode in emacs
- TheBrain - A tool for taking interconnected notes with an interactive graph.
- The Archive - A fast plain text Markdown note-taking app with Zettelkasten features like linking and tagging.
Extra Gardening Tools
- Webmentions - About the Webmentions system
- Webmention.io - A service to add Webmentions to your Garden
- Hypothesis - A layer of social meta commentary
- mkdocs-newsletter - An add-on to the MKdocs platform that generates a newsletter logging which pages have changed
How-To’s and Tutorials
- How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
- Own Your Second Brain: Set Up org-roam on Your Own Machine by Ian Jones
- Building a Digital Garden by Tom Critchlow
- Webmentions - Joining the IndieWeb with Svelte by Shawn Wang
- How to plant a Garden a video walkthrough for converting your RoamResearch DB into a public garden by Vlad Sitalo
- Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks by Maggie Appleton
Theory, Philosophy, and Navel-Gazing
- The Garden and the Stream: A Techno pastoral by Mike Caulfield – the original source of the concept of Digital Gardening
- Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom Critchlow
- How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
- My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks
- You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
- Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang
- What is a digital garden? by Chris Biscardi
- The Garden and the Stream: An IndieWeb Pop-up Session
- The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream by Will Stedden
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
Common Ground: Zettelkasten, Knowledge Graphs, Wikis, and Related Concepts
- Zettelkasten: knowledge and info management
- The Zettelkasten Method by Abram Demski
- A web of wikis by Neil Mather
- Bliki tooling by Neil Mather
- Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems by Bill Seitz
- As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (The Atlantic, 1945)
Digital Garden Directory
⭐️ = Featured; unique and exceptional examples
Gardener & Link
🛠 Build Tools
🌿Note Themes
The Mystery Andy System
Note-taking, education, tools for thought
⭐️ Gwern
Quantified self, spaced repetition, bitcoin
⭐️ Azlen Elza
Notion + Python
Design, Conversational interfaces, Tools for thought
Behaviour change, dialogue, systems thinking
Jekyll
Indie consulting
TiddlyWiki + TiddlyBlink + TiddlyMap
Art of Memory, IndieWeb, humanities, commonplace books, thought spaces
Design patterns, storytelling, systems
⭐️ Bill Seitz
Flask/Python with WikiFlux
Product management, startups, wiki theory, engineering
Cards Web – a custom OS platform
Complexity theory, design, systems thinking
GitBook
Tool obsessed. Code, web dev, art.
TiddlyWiki
Networked thinking, metacognition, evidence-based learning and self-education
Sapper
Web development, writing, speaking
Gatsby
Web development, React, AWS, GraphQL
Next.js
Anthropology, metaphors, visual explanations, and web development
Sector / Toast?
Web development, MDX, GraphQL, Gatsby
Org-mode
Programming, politics, climate change
Tiddlywiki (Pre-Release 5.1.23)
Culture and systems change, liberation theology, tech and pedagogy
Gatsby
Programming, Stoicism
Gatsby + MDX
Bootstrapping / indie-hacking, community building, web development
Gatsby
Web development, Gatsby, Emacs
Gatsby (Hasura Gitbook Starter)
Coding, Learning notes
Eleventy
Design, linux, privacy
The Mystery Andy System
React, web development
Gatsby
Books, Writing, Poetry
Custom coding a side project
Machine learning, automated language generation, quantum physics art, online transparency
Gatsby
Start-ups, engineering
PmWiki (with plenty of extensions PHP/JS/NodeJS/WebXR/CSS/Processing/etc)
Everytyhing but particularly programming, tools, tools for thoughts
Gatsby
python, data-engineering, coding, learning notes
🇪🇸 Drawing, coding, biology, introspection
TheBrain
autobiography, personal transformation
Jekyll, vimwiki
Tech, software, automation, some politics and issues
Toast + MDX
Web development, MDX, GraphQL, Gatsby, styled-components
C
Sailing, Design, Livecoding, Plan9
MediaWiki
Various life and tech topics, mostly Linux and audio FOSS
Jekyll (open-source template)
personal growth, ruby, web, linux
Jekyll
notes on coding, note taking, personal knowledge management and other random thoughts.
C++ (Mizi)
Tech, Art, Curating resources
Jekyll
Personal Wiki, Digital Garden. StrikingLoo’s Haphazard Repository of Knowledge, Opinions and Trivia
Jekyll + Roam Research as backend
Book notes, Codex Vitae, cocktails, experiments
Jekyll (open-source template)
personal wiki, DIY electronics, making music
Aqui Brain Dump
Science. Notes on books and papers. Technology Transfer. Working in Public
Foamy NextJS and NextJS with MDX
Digital garden of gardens. Learning and making in public.
Hyperdraft + Garden
Music / Design / Technology
Gatsby + MDX
Web development, CSS, design systems
Maxime’s jekyll template
Learning, art, online spaces, baking
Obsidian + Jekyll
Design, Branding, Business, Typography, Product
How to define code readability objectively? Applying SRS to all the things, Building Roam Garden
Knowledge synthesis, Scientific Creativity
MkDocs
Python, DevOps, life automation, health, art, …
Discourse
Productivity, Digital Gardening, Ideas, Reviews, and Recommendations
org-roam + Hugo
Writing, data science, math, life
TiddlyWiki
Writing, poetry, wellbeing, psychology
TiddlyWiki + homegrown scripts
Almost everything; emphasis on tech, reading, and how to live
Computer Music, Audio Programming, Literate Programming, Food
Python, GNU/Linux, DevOps, Flutter, traveling, cooking, …