A good blog should go beyond visual appeal and technical aspects like loading speed, responsiveness, and mobile-friendly design. It should arrange content in a way that is cognitively efficient for humans and entice readers to continue reading, similar to writing a marketing campaign document.
Digital Garden
To create a comprehensive and searchable blog, I’m drawn to the concept of digital gardening. This approach allows me to showcase polished blog posts while also maintaining a space for rougher drafts.
What is a Digital Garden?
I appreciate the analogy presented in How I built myself a Digital Garden. It describes three key components:
- Clouds: Excerpts of the raw material I consume.
- Drops: Notes I make using my own words. Each drop is a self-contained, minimal idea with links to other drops or clouds. I maintain a zettelkasten system for all my drops.
- Plants: The final text products, which can be blog posts, video scripts, design documents, etc.
Organic Growth and Incremental Writing
The digital garden concept aligns with the idea of incremental writing. As the collection of drops and plants grows, it becomes easier to cultivate new plants (ideas). The “big picture” of an article develops primarily within the collection, and to a lesser extent in the writer’s mind. This organic growth process allows for natural connections and expansions of ideas over time.
How to Navigate
An ideal navigation structure for a digital garden leverages the power of links to connect ideas. Unlike a rigid tree-like structure of folders and sub-folders, a digital garden flourishes as an interconnected graph. This structure reflects the cross-cutting nature of ideas, where a single concept can relate to many others across various contexts and topics.
Both easily accessible and more obscure information have their place in a digital garden:
- Less familiar or more complex information may be harder to find, but it offers greater information gain. This aligns with the concept of information entropy: the more surprising or unexpected the information, the higher its value.
- Familiar or closely related information is easier to discover, forming a dense “knowledge web” that reinforces existing concepts and provides context for new ideas.
This structure encourages exploration and growth, much like tending to a real garden, where new plants (ideas) can take root and flourish alongside established ones.
Encouraging myself and readers to explore the garden can also help mitigate recency bias, while many social media platforms use recommendation algorithms that enforce this bias. This cognitive bias leads us to favor ideas, arguments, and viewpoints that we’ve been exposed to recently, regardless of their actual merit. By presenting a diverse array of interconnected ideas, older, but still valuable ideas remain accessible and don’t get buried under newer content.
Problem of Updating Posts
To avoid perfectionism, not every post is equally refined. I can implement custom components(TODO) to hide my rough drafts; if you want to read those parts, you can click a button to show them.
If I constantly update posts, some readers may see unfinished content early on. Later, when I update the post, old readers have no effective way to “diff” the updated content, forcing them to re-read the whole thing.