How to make your own digital garden

There are a number of guides available on the internet for setting up your digital garden, so have your pick. I’ll share my personal tech stack and workflow below.

Choose a platform for your garden

There are some platforms out there that will do most everything for you, including hosting your garden and giving you some sort of editor to write your notes. Notion, Craft, and Obsidian Publish come to mind.

Personally, I enjoy developing my notes locally and pushing the changes to a remote git repository, where I can create my own theme, rendered by Blot. This takes a bit more work than any off-the-shelf solution but I enjoy having full control over the styling.

Acquire hosting

Assuming you want your digital garden to be accessible to others, you’re going to need to host your garden.

Depending on your platform, hosting may or may not be included right out of the box, otherwise you’ll need to set something up. Cheaper VPS shared-hosting is one option. If you’re pro-code and are looking for a rather simple option, consider Blot (no affiliation).

Acquire a Domain Name

Either way, you’re going to need a domain name. I use and recommend NameCheap, I prefer them over GoDaddy or other marketplaces. This should cost about $10 a year for a .com.

I then recommend you set up Cloudflare to manage your DNS. Pretty much everything under the sun plays nice with Cloudflare, so if you choose to manage everything there you’ll likely never have to leave, even if you decide to re-platform, or repurpose your domain altogether. Don’t underestimate this.

Choose a markdown editor

My favorite markdown editor is Obsidan. They have a rich ecosystem with plenty of plugins providing a near-infinite ability to customize, but there are plenty of other’s to choose from. Bear is another popular option with a pretty, albeit less customizable editor.

Write often, and push through

You’re probably not going to be happy with what you write. You definitely won’t like it 3 months from now when you read it again and wonder what you were thinking. This is normal, and completely ok. Just keep going… you’ll get better over time.

Learn from others

Read up on how different people are making their digital garden’s a reality. You can even read about My note workflow and How my garden works under the hood. You can take a look at this list of digital gardening tools and example sites.