Pruning, harvesting, replanting, and other forced metaphors
I’ve been doing a lot of work on my digital garden over the last few weeks, and wanted to briefly mention some updates.
- I completely replanted the Reference Guides. Rather than being “recreated MDN,” it’s now big bucket of notes and how-to articles, filterable with tags. I’m harvesting content from the old guides, cleaning it up, and planting it anew.
- I’ve added new garden sections. I now have dedicate planters for my favorite media, places I’ve been to, info about my D&D characters and MtG decks, and my ongoing projects.
- I’ve added more tools, including my favorite gardening tools, items for ditching cable, and recommended digital security tools.
- I’m (probably) removing the snippets section. It made sense at the time, but it now feels redundant with the revised guides section. I plan to replant various snippets into that area of the garden.
- I migrated the membership portal to the main site. Now that
allmost of the same content is out from behind the paywall, having folks go to another site to manage their account doesn’t really make sense. I also update the messages shown throughout the site if a member is signed in.
From a UX perspective, I’ve…
- Added a leaf icon to items that are “seedlings,” guides that are light on content and still in development.
- Updated the whole CSS to Kelp UI, which has been delightful.
- Added CSS that automatically shows an icon next to every external link for clarity and better UX.
- Styled checkbox and radio button filters to look like buttons on the guides and search pages. I love the way it looks and works!
The one thing I’m struggling with is that with this approach to building websites, I’m not really sure how a blog fits in anymore.
A lot of what I’d blog about really belongs in guides, but there’s no great way to have “this content was updated” in feed form. I’ll be curious to see how my thinking about it evolves over time.