Digital Garden¶

A digital garden is a way of publishing personal notes online that invites ongoing revision rather than presenting finished articles. Unlike a blog with posts organized by date, a garden grows over time: notes link to each other, get updated as understanding deepens, and leave visible traces of earlier thinking. This is exactly what I want from a personal knowledge site.

How I publish¶

The current setup is Zensical, which is what builds this very site. I write in Obsidian as before, but publishing now happens through Git: every note in this repository is published automatically when pushed to the main branch. No per-note frontmatter flag is required. The repository itself is the publication boundary.

Vault split¶

I now maintain two separate Obsidian vaults instead of one. All digital garden notes live in this repository and get published. Work notes stay in a separate vault focused entirely on professional use. The old combined vault still exists but has shrunk considerably. Where I need to reference published knowledge from the work vault, I use the public URL of the relevant page rather than an internal link.

This separation makes both vaults more useful. PARA became genuinely more approachable once Resources and Archive were no longer cluttered with a mix of personal knowledge and work artefacts.

What I used before¶

My previous publishing approach was Obsidian together with the Digital Garden plugin. Only notes carrying a specific frontmatter property were published, so personal and work notes could coexist in the same vault without accidental exposure. The result looked almost identical to Obsidian itself. It worked well, but the Zensical approach gives a cleaner separation and a more conventional publishing workflow.

Other alternatives I evaluated¶

A third option is the mkdocs-obsidian-bridge plugin, which connects Obsidian to an mkdocs-based site. Dataview and Excalidraw are not supported natively. I wrote a small plugin to work around the Excalidraw limitation by exporting drawings as PNG files via Kroki: mkdocs-obsidian-excalidraw-plugin. The mkdocs approach makes sense if you already maintain technical documentation with mkdocs and want Obsidian as the editor.