Joel Hooks writes about AngularJS, Vim, Rails, and building products, and keeps his site as a digital garden rather than a chronological blog.
HN commenters link it for his digital garden essay, which they find appealing, and for older AngularJS and Robotlegs write-ups.
Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites:
- http://100r.co/
- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html
Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon slightly dusty, delightful corners.
This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain.
As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years.
--
More written words on digital gardens:
- https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
- https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/
I ran across this[0] post about a month ago, which makes an argument against the chronological blog, and to rather embrace the digital garden. I quite liked the idea. For so long it's felt like a blog is the default, but I find browsing pages without a blog much more interesting. I think it also removes that pressure to post all the time, as adding content is simply adding content. It doesn't matter when it was last updated. Looking at my history (which I had to use to find this), I deleted all my started and abandoned blogs the same day I read this.
edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some curation to it.
[0] https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden/
Learning in public I think [1]. That is asking things on social media, starting a blog or even better, digital garden [2]. Removing all kinds of friction between sharing, creating and learning.
That assumes the essentials of proper sleep, nutrition and basic fitness are taken care of [3]. Aside from this meta 'help' stuff, the one tool that was a 100x force multiplier for me is Karabiner [4]. Share it on HN all the time but no one uses it. :|
1: https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/
2: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
3: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/health
4: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/karabiner
The Model files are storing state, essentially. In this case they are following a pattern from Robotlegs (as3). I wrote it up here http://joelhooks.com/2011/03/12/an-introduction-to-robotlegs-as3-part-2-models/
These are then injected as "services" in your controllers.
Link doesn't work.
Is this the page you were trying to link?
http://joelhooks.com/blog/2013/04/23/5-essential-vim-plugins/