I've realized how I am going to share, propagate, and cultivate my digital garden.

My most common way of working, for the past year, has been remote.

Once a quarter, getting together with the team, has been the practice in my current paid gig.
I'm co-hosting an online community's Job Seekers Support Group, getting together fortnightly with past Active Voice cohorts.
Inching ever closer to a multi-year effort of developing my site into the Indie Web.
Building and cultivating my digital garden—my website.

All the while, I've been regularly writing in my journal, adding to my links, getting my essays set up (while drafting more), setting up the infrastructure for tending to my books, and slowly building on my newsletter practice with an every-few-weeks newsletter (while moving my newsletter 500 Characters to Buttondown).

With all these updates, I've been struggling to figure out where to take the form my garden takes—the design emerging from realities of use, how it's grown, and the behaviors its enabled.

I've tried this with /tags, and it needs more continued development. Not yet "working for me," so still building.

What's been working has been having my full archive available at /journal and /links.

Video Calling

My weeks are filled with video calls. Whether it be the "just being available" for spontaneous, synchronous needs, necessary collaboration moments, and teaming necessities.

How I work best, is being able to share a screen with the people on the call and collaborate on building a document together. Or sets of documents, references, or concepts I'm referring to.

I also have helped facilitate conference chat conversations by dropping in links to references speakers make in their presentations, be it a: book, website, etc. If there's a URL written, I get it. If the book's cited, a Bookshop.org link to purchase it. A concept I'm curious about, sharing pebbles. A speaker's website or contact information, when they share it on slides—into the chat.

I took the Stengthsfinder test, again, late last year as part of a Power Shift Leadership Accelerator cohort. My new top 5 were: Ideation, Intellection, Strategic, Input, Arranger. We discussed the framing strengths, reflecting on each is what these mean.

I'm unsurprised to realize my garden's emerged to be strengths made real: of how I work together with others, where I budget my "free time", while finding grounding routines & rituals of everyday life.

Screen Sharing

In screen sharing, while citing a reference, I go to my website, and search the pages of /links or /journal.

I enjoy how, when selecting a /tag, the page converts to a search results with posts of that tag being shown, sorted by content types:

Currently, public: links, journal, essays, and pages.
Active development: resume, work, reviews, hire me, articles, quotes, books, and library.
Planned at some point: workshops, talks, services, shop, photography, now, timeline, garden, lists.

So, quickly, with all these content types, tags won't work, and full page search won't be particularly performant or particularly usable.

How can I shift the form of my website towards representing this work...and something I can use, actively, in my video-call, remote-human-interactive life?

Search

An "easy" feature to implement—I don't really know as an individual contributor, but I've worked with search and...millions of people get paid millions of dollars (and, more often than not, very few dollars), to try and make search good.

It's an exciting possibility of how that feels like a foundational feature to my garden's perusal & discovery experience.

What to name it?

I want to dive deeper into the metaphor of gardens, to name this separately than /search.

Search is boring. And that's not the purpose of the feature.

It's about getting lost, finding rabbit holes, discovering warrens, and learning & reading interesting things along the journey.

Fundamentally asking:

How are gardens interacted with?
What are some histories of gardens?
How are gardens verb-ed about?
What are the names and types of gardens by size? (e.g. indoors, herb, food, etc.)

From there, figure out a word that fits.

Another "future feature", or future structure is:

/garden: a curated landing page of things I've written & created (journal, articles, essays, photos, books)
/soil: a curated landing page of things I've read, reviewed, or collected (links, library, quotes)
/this: the place to search for all of everything separated by content type (or select by level of metaphor)