what is this website?

Posted on 00Y09

This website was created on November 4th, 2025 (00V13).1 Depending on when you are reading this, that may have been very recently or a long time ago.

In his 2015 keynote The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral,2 Mike Caulfield describes two different philosophies for the web: the Garden and the Stream.

The Garden is the web as topology. It utilizes links, slow growth, evergreen notes,3 and things arranged next to each other instead of in a timeline.

In a true garden, you walk around. You follow a path because one thought feels close to another, not because it was posted last Tuesday. Nothing is ever truly old; it just sits there until someone stumbles across it again and decides to water it. Dates, if they exist at all, are secondary. The shape of the space matters more than the arrow of time.

My website borrows a few habits from the garden.

  • There are interconnected pages that live outside of time and keep growing, such as /about, /colophon, /uses, /now, and more.
  • My homepage displays a few featured writings, not sorted chronologically and absolutely no paginator.
  • Ideas for my writings often start as tiny seedlings in the microblog, and later blossom into fully-fledged writings.
  • Every page on my website can be updated, tended to. I can come back and edit an old post, add a paragraph, fix a broken thought, and the updated on line at the bottom changes accordingly.
  • Pages are connected to each other through tags and manual links.

This site is not a Garden, though.

The Stream is chronology, newest-first, posts that appear and then slide away forever. You see it on most social media, from Instagram to X.

In the stream you don’t explore; you stand in the current and let things rush past. The only organizing principle is simply “when”, and once something scrolls off the front page it might as well not exist anymore.

My website still carries a lot of the stream in its bones.

  • Almost every post on my website includes dates:
    • The /posts have a published on date, and are sorted accordingly.
    • My micro blog is sorted chronologically, with the newest entries on top.
  • Most writings are written, published, and then left exactly as they were on the day they went live.

This site is not a Stream, though.

It lives in the messy middle.

Some corners feel like cultivated beds, some corners feel like a fast-moving river, and most of the land is just ordinary ground where both weeds and flowers grow however they want.

I am fine with that. I do not need to pick a side or finish the transformation.

This place is simply mine. My little corner of the web. It can keep changing, shape-shifting, as long as I am still here to tend to it.

Thanks for walking through it with me, whenever you happened to arrive.

If you feel like staying longer, here are a few nice spots:

Or simply wander my writings and the micro blog.

Take your time, and I will see you around.

  1. The Arvelie date format is an alternative calendar system with 26 months of 14 days each, often used in personal wikis and indie web projects for a more uniform and project-relative timing. Read more about it here. ↩︎

  2. Mike Caulfield’s 2015 keynote, delivered at dLRN at Stanford, contrasts personalized, linked knowledge spaces (gardens) with chronological feeds (streams), influencing the modern “digital garden” movement. ↩︎

  3. Evergreen notes, popularized by Andy Matuschak, are atomic, concept-focused notes designed to grow, evolve, and interconnect over time, fostering long-term knowledge development rather than serving as temporary record-keeping. Their conceptual roots trace back to Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, traditional commonplace books, and Sönke Ahrens, who helped popularize the modern Zettelkasten method. ↩︎

Updated on 00Y12