cynnality

The term digital garden might sound a bit silly but it's actually very consicely defined. Maggie Appleton details the history of the term and what it represents in this article. Some stand-out points from the article that are relevant to how I use the term in the context of this website:

• It’s a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
• Digital gardening is part of the pushback against the limited range of vanilla web formats and layouts we now take for granted.
• Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
• ...editability is one of the main selling points of the web. Gardens lean into this – there is no “final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.
• In performance-blog-land you do that thinking and researching privately, then shove it out at the final moment. A grand flourish that hides the process. In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the open internet. You post ideas while they’re still “seedlings,” and tend them regularly until they’re fully grown, respectable opinions.
• Gardens involve experimenting with the native languages of the web – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They’re the most flexible and robust tools we have for building interconnected knowledge online. Gardens are a chance to question the established norms of a ‘personal website’, and make space for weirder, wilder experiments.
• Gardens offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren’t cookie cutter profiles. They’re the higher-fidelity version, complete with quirks, contradictions, and complexity.
• Low friction and deep contextualization

This website began as a way for me to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through building things that interested me. Over time its evolved into a personal archival collection of writing, research, structured datasets, and custom-built tools for collecting, organizing, and publishing information.

I'm currently working on a general update to the design and layout. Next I'll be fine-tuning the posts and entries systems I have going.

Checking into the basketball pages sporadically to update here and there.

Recently been researching the history of war and conflict globally and within specific regions. Collecting information, sources, and notes here