I'm about to start writing Craft & Practice #5, the fifth post of my digital gardening newsletter.
It's getting to a point where I, personally, need consistent themes of headers for different sorts of content or updates around the garden. Headers I've used thus far:
Refreshed Topics
Composting
This is what I'll use to share new things I'm building into my website. The metaphor, functionally, works really well with the concept of good, crafted code—taking things, breaking them down, creating into something better. This can be everything from refactoring features, adding new pages or features, or rearranging content to make more sense. It's the act of creating from the soil, making the environment of the garden better for production. That's what my feature improvement is.
Gardening
Things I've written since. These are actual things I can link others to, share, and distribute.
Cultivating
These are what I'm taking in. It's the subjects or content I'm reading, digesting, taking notes of, and tending to. Similar to composting, this is about strengthening the soil, where all the things are in the garden are grown from. It's not necessarily a 1:1 thing, but they're direct influences on things that keep my gardening practice going. It's also about cultivating an independent web, creating links to and fro across the internet & planet outside of the bounds of walled social networks and capitalistic-oligarch-tech-fascist inclinations of popular social media.
Germinating
This is what I'm just starting to build. New "garden beds" or ideas that aren't yet published, lived, or linked to yet...but they're present and live. Just need to know of the link and be shared that link.
Future Words
That's all I have for now, with somewhat regularity of posting. In the future, I have other words that continue the metaphor that'll be useful:
- Pollinating or Reaping: when I'm on a podcast, giving a talk, or something more out in the world with others. This is me sharing ideas and things that have gone through the process of creation.
- Propagating: This will be my digital garden-y term for syndication. Specifically, around the POSSE framework—Post on your Own Site; Syndicate Elsewhere—but I still need to get that functioning.
- Transplanting: When I move a post from, say, my past newsletters into my digital garden, making my garden their more permanent home.
- Forecasting: When I share things that will affect my gardening in the future. This could be change of literal season, life season, or something to that effect.
- Harvesting: when I post or have some writings that started in my digital garden and are now published elsewhere. This is similar to Propagation, but more intentional with others, somewhere else. I can "sell" my harvest, just as much as share.