This is misguided. Gardening is a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.
I like this though. I think of my blog as a garden, I plant new stuff, tidy up the old, sometimes and poke around.
I’ve been interested in the Garden versus Stream discussion around creating web content. Some of the sites I’ve work most on have be gardens made with stream technology 1.
Since I’ve installed the Posted Today plugin I often look back over previous posts. This leads to some tidying up, and fixing of links, formatting, adding tags and the like.
This feels very like pruning, staking and generally tidying up. Behaviour that is usually associated with gardening. My blog is mostly for myself 2. I feel like I am regularly pottering around, joining dots and revisiting old thoughts.
An example: A while ago it was the 10th anniversary of my post Field Recording at the Scottish Music Centre. It is now full of broken links. Some, Flash soundcloud players, I was able to fix, replacing the old flash players. Some were just gone to 404. Of these some I could add archive links. I didn’t fix everything because I got a bit distracted with all the links I followed to check. Many rabbits holes.
I am not making a huge effort in this, I find it valuable to read my old posts and if I have a moment do a little gardening cleaning up my stream.
Featured image: n3_w1150 | Curtis’s botanical magazine.. London ; New York [… | Flickr Public Domain
