The digital garden, to be specific. A few months ago, I finally figured out how to get my Obsidian vault online without having to pay $8 USD a month to sync it to the internets. There is no specific reason for this other than for it to exist on the web and for me to gaze at my garden as lovingly as I do my courtyard in my house.

Anyway, $8 monthly was too steep an ask for this self indulgent need, so I dug into it a little more and within minutes found out that there is a community plugin which allows your vault to push updates through Github to Vercel. Anyway, long story short, here is my Garden of Eden. It’s lame, I know. I’ll get around to renaming it to something less obvious and more hip some day, but for now, it exists.

So now that my digital garden exists, I realized that a haphazard filing system was no longer acceptable. It was public. It was out in the world. As now an aspect of my ego, it could no longer live like a neural hobgoblin. So for the first time since I started using Obsidian, I really put my brain to work and got to creating a system for my notes and info processing.

It was actually quite timely because I really needed to get my grad school notes in order. Much of my work from ETEC 500 kind of slid down the drain because I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. Compiled with the work I had to put in for my presentation at Nara JALT, it all kind of was supremely beneficial. I had to digress from a lot of the methodologies that Youtube tutored me with in order to maintain a “Zettlekasten” system with Obsidian… and basically figure out what the heck I needed to do. This video really got me started, especially with using the [[ ]] codes to create notes as tags (which I call nodes), rather than actually using the tagging system itself. Thus also allowing me to create indexes and later on, clusters so the nodes (notes) are highly retrievable and the graph is a lot more manageable and readable for me.

Anyway, it’s been quite exciting overall, seeing it all come together. I don’t know what it is about it going on the web but it revolutionized my note taking/information processing, particularly because I am now actually eager to prune and maintain the digital garden, since as we know, the most challenging part of a system is not the creation, but the necessary maintenance of it.