Can the internet feel good? As digital technologies become integrated in almost every aspect of our lives, there is an interesting trend of rising exhaustion and anxiety. Many are finding recluse by disconnecting, returning to unplugged spaces like private journals or a cabin in the woods (waldenponding) to escape from apps and technologies meant to boost productivity and connection.
Mind Blend is my digital space to imagine an alternate experience of the internet to explore, connect, and evolve. One that is calm, kind, fun, and evokes awe and inspiration. It is modeled after a community of people curating "digital gardens" and "cozy internet" corners as spaces to think, reflect, and grow as a response to the chaotic stressful nature of the web.
Mind Blend is an invitation to others to join me in my cozy "digital thought cafe" to blend thoughts, feelings, ideas, and experiences to extract meaningful insights. People start with a topic or question and are encouraged to brain dump all their thoughts in a mindmap environment. Once they release their thoughts, they can look at others’ mind maps and may make new connections to their own. They may choose to go through this process as many times as they please but at the end, are encouraged to extract insights and make a "brew" of their ideas. The format of the ideas is open, and includes text, images, videos, gifs, and so on.
Thank you to maximevaillancourt for helping me get started with my digital garden.
(See below) : Use this template repository to get started with your own digital garden.
I wrote a tutorial explaining how to set it up: Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll
Preview the template here: https://digital-garden-jekyll-template.netlify.app/
- Based on Jekyll, a static website generator
- Supports Roam-style double bracket link syntax to other notes
- Creates backlinks to other notes automatically
- Features link previews on hover
- Includes graph visualization of the notes and their links
- Features a simple and responsive design
- Supports Markdown or HTML notes
Update (January 2023): it seems that GitHub Pages supports custom plugins now, thanks to GitHub Actions (view relevant discussion).
GitHub Pages only partially supports this template: to power the interactive notes graph, this template uses a custom Jekyll plugin to generate the graph data in notes_graph.json, and GitHub Pages doesn't support custom Jekyll plugins.
If you want to use the graph with GitHub Pages, you may try building your garden locally using Jekyll then pushing the result to GitHub Pages.
Alternatively, you may deploy your garden to Netlify and it'll work out of the box. I wrote a guide explaining how to set this up.
If you don't care about the graph, you can simply remove it from this layout, as explained here.
Source code is available under the MIT license.