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brainsteam/content/posts/2022/04/digital-gardening/index.md

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+---
+title: "Digital Gardening"
+date: 2022-04-03T15:41:09+01:00
+url: /2022/04/03/03-04-digital-gardening
+type: post
+resources:
+ - name: feature
+   src: images/folder.jpg
+tags:
+  - personal
+  - knowledge-management
+  - digital-garden
+mp-syndicate-to:
+    - https://brid.gy/publish/mastodon
+    - https://brid.gy/publish/twitter
+---
+
+I'm currently undergoing a bit of a refactor of my personal knowledge management (PKM) approach. Up until now I've been a victim of the [collector's fallacy](https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/) in which one can trick themselves into a false sense of security RE: learning by bookmarking everything that looks interesting for processing later. I use [Wallabag](https://wallabag.org/en), which is a self-hosted bookmark reading app similar to [Pocket](https://getpocket.com/en/), to collect articles that I might want to read later. The problem is that I've ended up with hundreds of unread articles in my to-read list and I've not ended up doing much with the material that I have read. I want to get into the habit of reading articles more thoroughly, taking notes and linking them back to material I've read elsewhere. 
+
+{{<figure src="images/folder.jpg" caption="Creating a personal web of knowledge is a bit like tending a garden - photo by [Karolina Grabowska](https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-watering-the-plants-4750272/) ">}}
+
+
+A [couple of weeks back](https://brainsteam.co.uk/2022/3/20/20-03-2022-weeknote-week11/) I started looking into building a [Zettelkasten](https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/#the-introduction-to-the-zettelkasten-method) inside [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/) which has been my app of choice for personal knowledge management for a few years. One of the biggest problems I found with this is that navigating between notes inside Joplin still feels quite unintuitive even with some of the very cool plugins installed like the [node graph visualiser](https://github.com/treymo/joplin-link-graph). I also find it quite difficult writing "just for myself" - if I can trick my brain into thinking that someone else might read my writing I'm often able to write more. This has inspired me to try and find a suitable way to move as much as my knowledgebase as is appropriate into the public eye (I won't be sharing birth certificates or insurance policies, those will stay in my private joplin vault).
+
+## What is a Digital Garden?
+
+Digital Gardens are essentially [public zettelkastens](https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/comments/lvtvko/what_is_the_difference_between_digital_garden_and/). Basically you create your own "wiki-like" site where you collect your notes and write them up in a way that is semi-publishable. 
+
+The digital garden metaphor extends to the notes that you create as you create them. Initially you start by dumping some initial thoughts and comments in a page. This is a seedling. You then start to connect your seedling note to other pieces of information in your garden by linking them together and you start to tidy up the content. Once your note is an established part of the garden (it's got incoming and outgoing links to a few things) and it's clear it's budding. Finally when you think a page is more or less complete it becomes evergreen. Obviously information can go out of date and pages need updating and editing just as real plants need watering and pruning. 
+
+For further reading [Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com/) has a really good [long read about digital gardening and the seedling/budding/evergreen metaphor](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history).
+
+## Getting Some Inspiration: What Others are Doing
+
+I started by looking at some other folks' Digital Gardens such as [Andy's Notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes), [Tom Critchlow's wikifolder](https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/) and [Chris Aldrich's garden](https://tw.boffosocko.com/#). It's plain to see that some of these gardens have been in progress for years and contain huge amounts inter-linked knowledge. Some of them have very cool flashy UX experiences like the ability to hover over a link in a note and preview the next note or open each note in a column progressively from left to right. 
+
+
+## What I Tried
+I really liked the idea of using a theme like [gatsby-garden](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/plugins/gatsby-garden/) to provide a flashy UX with links in between notes on top of simple markdown files. However, I found I just couldn't get on with Gatsby - I couldn't make it do what I wanted in terms of structuring my collections and after a few hours of faff I gave up. I ended up looking at different wiki packages instead. I recently tried out [bookstack](https://www.bookstackapp.com/) and whilst its shiny and polished, I don't feel like its flexible enough for what I need (illustrative example: I want to be able to create wiki links to pages that don't exist yet and "click through" to create them. In bookstack you need to create pages before you link them). I also tried out [wikijs](https://wiki.js.org/) which uses markdown and offers a lot of flexibility to the user. 
+
+## What I Settled On
+Eventually though, I settled on an old favourite in [dokuwiki](dokuwiki.org/). I have a softspot for dokuwiki. I've been using it for about a decade and I had an instance set up as a personal wiki for tracking notes and learnings while I was at university. I stopped using it when I moved a lot of my knowledge (or should I say collections of "stuff" that I haven't learned properly as per collector's fallacy) into Evernote and then into Joplin.
+
+Dokuwiki is mature, fast, lightweight to run and simple to use. The interface is simple and unpretentious so whilst I don't get the snazzy pop-overs when I hover on a link, it renders really fast and doesn't put any pressure on my browser. The only real downside I've found so far is that the wiki syntax is slightly different to Markdown. 
+
+## What Next
+
+I've set up my new digital garden/zettelkasten/personal wiki/second brain [here](https://notes.jamesravey.me) and the idea is that I will try to maintain it by adding my knowledge and thoughts on different topics as I encounter them rather than collecting a bunch of stuff that I will never get around to reading. I intend to move a lot of my web clippings and bookmarks out of joplin and wallabag into my digital garden and trash stuff that no longer feels relevant.
+
+Dokuwiki has a pretty powerful ecosystem and API so I'm looking at where I can automate some activities too.

brainsteam/content/posts/2022/04/weeknote-13.md

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+---
+title: "Weeknote 2022 - Week 13"
+date: 2022-04-03T14:46:58+01:00
+description: A summary of week 13 2022
+url: /2022/4/3/weeknote-week13
+type: post
+mp-syndicate-to:
+- https://brid.gy/publish/mastodon
+- https://brid.gy/publish/twitter
+tags:
+  - personal
+  - work
+  - knowledge-management
+  - digital-garden
+---
+
+This week has been fairly uneventful for us in the Ravenscroft household. It's largely been business as usual. We did our usual pattern of 2 days in the office and 3 days at home.
+
+*******************************
+
+I've been continuing my somewhat meta "thinking about thinking" stream of thought from last week with a thorough refactor of my personal knowledge management practices. I started writing an update about it here which turned into a full fledged blog post so I've published that as a separate piece [here](/2022/04/03/03-04-digital-gardening/)
+
+
+*******************************
+
+I've not done much gaming recently but yesterday I read an interesting article about [Elden Ring's novel open world design](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/how-elden-ring-succeeds-by-ignoring-20-years-of-open-world-design) and I decided to take the plunge and buy it. This was my first experience of a From Software game. I know that, by reputation, these games are typically very challenging and often frustrating (your character will die many many times) and I went in with my eyes wide open. I got my butt kicked by the boss in the tutorial area of the game about 5 times before progressing into the game world proper but I really enjoyed myself. A+ would get completely annihilated again.
+
+
+*******************************
+
+With our local eco shop [sadly shutting down](/2022/3/27/27-03-2022-weeknote-week12/), I've been scoping out where else I can get hold of zero packaging products and refills. On saturday we drove to the nearby [Westlands Farm Shop](https://www.westlandsfarmshop.co.uk/) where they have a decent selection of refillable toiletries and detergents as well as veggies, dairy and meat produced on the farm itself. I think I've found a new favourite local business.
+
+*******************************
+
+It's been a bit chilly for gardening this week with temperatures plummeting below zero several days in a row. We're pretty glad we didn't plant the veggies in the new raised beds yet as they might not have fared well in the frost! Hopefully things will warm up again soon. They don't have as big a selection as All Good Things used to have but its reasonable. We also discovered that there's a zero waste refill shop [a few minutes down the road from my office](https://thespinney53.co.uk/) which I might try to scope out during the week at some point.
+
+*******************************
+
+For anyone who's familiar with AWS and their somewhat confusing portal, it's always interesting to see new users of the platform come onboard and try to make sense of it. A friend of mine from university recently had a first time experience trying to set up a simple web app to run in AWS and I thoroughly enjoyed reading their twitter thread on the matter:
+
+<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">me: i want to run a trivial app on AWS<br>aws: WELCOME TO OUR SOLUTION STORE DO YOU WANT TO USE FARGATE, COPILOT, LIGHTSAIL OR APP RUNNER? <a href="https://t.co/IDbZ7Z0Nwf">pic.twitter.com/IDbZ7Z0Nwf</a></p>&mdash; Sam Nicholls (@samstudio8) <a href="https://twitter.com/samstudio8/status/1509508442137972745?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 
+
+
+## Next Week
+
+I'm working for Filament 2 days this week so that I can spend 3 days on my PhD since I'm trying to get my last experiment/paper over the line so that I can really knuckle down and focus on finishing my thesis (which will be my existing papers + a new intro chapter + some editing) by the end of the academic year. One of our remote staff is coming down to visit the offices on Wednesday so we're planning on having a work pub lunch and we're planning on having another go at meeting up with Mum now that she's gotten over covid.