Digital Garden — EQ in IT
Situation
Knowledge as chronological posts ages quickly and loses connections. A digital garden is the opposite of a blog: notes are not ordered by date but linked with [[wikilinks]], have maturity stages (seedling → evergreen), and evolve over time.
The task: publish a personal Zettelkasten as a static site where the reader sees a network of ideas and navigates by meaning, not chronology.
Task
I needed my notes to stay connected instead of sliding down a timeline, so I owned the static site where ideas surface through wikilinks and maturity stages rather than post dates.
Actions
Content model: atomic notes in Obsidian-flavored Markdown. Each note is one idea, with YAML frontmatter, tags, and [[wikilinks]] to neighboring concepts.
Quartz v4:
- TypeScript plugins for rendering — extensibility out of the box.
- Backlinks: each note shows everyone that links to it.
- Graph view: a visualization of the note graph (nodes = notes, edges = links).
- Full-text search, popover preview on
[[wikilink]]hover. - Static output — host on GitHub Pages, no server.
Result
The power of a digital garden is in the links, not the individual notes. Backlinks turn a note into a “node” and show which contexts include it. The graph turns note accumulation into a navigable structure: topic clusters and isolated islands are visible. A chronological blog answers “when”; a garden answers “how is this connected.”
Limitations
The garden is a personal tool, not a product: notes are immature by definition, some stay seedlings, and the links reflect the author’s thinking rather than a finished system. That makes the site more honest than a blog, but also less predictable for an outside reader.