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How I Built This Website

March 2021

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After coming across digital gardens online, I decided I wanted to build one myself. I began this process by researching personal websites and digital gardens that I found interesting, dynamic, or unique. A ton of my inspiration goes out to these developers, so thank you!

Here’s a small sample of these pages:

• https://tomcritchlow.com/(This was the very first digital garden that I found which pretty much made me instantly think “I want to build something like this.”)
• https://rsms.me/(This is just an absolutely beautiful page made by a CSS guru who I personally look up to when it comes to web development.)
• https://busterbenson.com/piles/(An alternative take on the digital garden that I discovered through Maggie Appleton’s article below.)

So, I come across this concept of a digital garden. Mind you, I’m not actively developing a website at this point. But this idea wasn’t something that appeared and disappeared in passing. It burrowed into my brain.

A great quote from Maggie Appleton’s fantastic article:

The point of the garden is that’s it’s a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that are particular to you.

This is more about making something all by myself containing whatever I want in whatever format I want. The beauty here is the dynamic nature (see what I did there) of the garden and the fact that it isn’t a continuos feed of curated content, but rather an ever-changing, and very raw, work in progress. The goal here isn’t pristine styling and perfect content; it’s about growth, over time, above all else.

After perusing numerous digital gardens and working up the courage to begin my own, I struck out with a clear design in mind.

1. Let’s host on Github pages, because who wants to pay money to run a server.
2. Let’s buy a domain name, because who wants Github in their domain name (sorry, not sorry Github).
3. Let’s use Jekyll. A clear favorite of digital gardeners (is that a term? I’m not sure), Jekyll allows developers to exist between the worlds of templated Bootstrap and static blogs like Wordpress. It’s the perfect technology for a digital garden and has been a joy to learn.
4. Let’s use SCSS, because organizing CSS let’s me think better.
5. Let’s have some fun and figure out the rest along the way.