i made a digital garden
seeding my digital garden
for a while now, my online presence has been spread across a handful of places that are loosely linked and don't talk to each other. a Bear Blog here, a static site there, a poetry chapbook floating somewhere in a cloudflare bucket or on an aging site. useful stuff, but scattered. no centre of gravity. nowhere to keep track of and tend to my things.
so i built one. it has been ploughed and seeded.
km.garden ⇲ is a digital garden, a quiet index for everything i make and care about online. it ain't a portfolio, not a landing page or dashboard, its more like a handmade seed catalogue or library + garden: here's what exists, here's where to find it, here's what's growing.
why now
i've been thinking a lot lately about the web as a place to tend to rather than a space to perform. most platforms push you toward recency, and immediacy: have you read the latest post? seen the latest update. a garden is different. things can sit. things can be half-finished. things can get revised quietly without an announcement. things can be half-forgotten about and become overgrown only to be found with some gentle cutting and pruning.
i wanted a home base that could hold all of it. my writing, my art and collage work, my zines, my blogs, all my projects, and growing links to my corporeal body of work: teaching, printing, and photography. something that links outward rhizomatically, without pretending to be a hub for hot traffic. in the end, it is a place where all my personalities can coalesce, building an idea of who i actually am. a whole, though complicated person 🥹.
my garden's design
- pure html + css: no javaScript, no build step, no framework
- a three-pane layout: nav on the left, content in the middle, an index with contextual notes on the right
- assets live in cloudflare r2 (collages, poetry pdfs, zines, images) to keep it as light as possible
- hosted via github pages
the palette is Sanzo Wada #310 -- olive, dark green, cream, peach. the fonts are ibm pplex sans, ibm plex mono, and a dash of bytesize. it feels to me like something you'd find in a library basement, on an old computer, and that's intentional.
what it'll hold
right now the garden consists of a welcome/about page, a weblog, a projects list, a clutter page (55 collage pieces, 15 poetry chapbooks, and 6 zines), and a webroll linking my fave web spots.
over time i plan to add more writing, field notes, maybe some digital photography. things that don't fit neatly into a blog post format. it is a slow and intentional space, and i love that!
the intention
this isn't about growing an audience. it's about having a place that's mine that is legible, durable, and low-maintenance. i want something that doesn't depend on a platform's continued goodwill to exist. something that is my own and that avoids all the traps and pitfalls of the attention economy.
does this all mean you shouldn't check it out? of course not, a digital garden is also about finding community. i hope to find other gardeners and friendly neighbours to share and network with. welcome to my garden, embracing the wonders of the slow web:
go have a look kmsgarden.com ⇲!