Intro to the Greenhouse

Welcome in!

Chosen basically by free association, I’m using the term “Greenhouse” to refer to the concept of this site. The word is mostly inspired by the idea of a “Digital Garden,” an idea I’ve taken to recently, but one that I felt didn’t quite capture my needs for a website.

Like a greenhouse, this site presents a collection of living, growing things, and is tended to in much the same way. Instead of walking among rows of plants, however, you’ll find yourself instead perusing the contents of one of my secondary brains.

Unlike a digital garden, though, it won’t be quite as labyrinthine. Ideas won’t necessarily be in half-finished snippets, nor linked in winding chains. At least some content (like this blog section) will be presented in a linear fashion.

Of course, this is all subject to change. It’s too early to know what the growth and evolution of this place will really look like. Maybe I’ll decide “Greenhouse” is a silly concept, maybe I’ll feel too constrained by the slightly higher level of organization, or maybe I’ll just give up and start serving a TiddlyWiki to this domain.

And yes, I could just call this a “blog” or “personal website,” because that’s what it is, but doesn’t “Greenhouse” just feel cooler?

A Brief History

My whole life, I’ve been fascinated by organization strategies and journaling methods. Ironically, none of these practices ever worked for me for longer than a few weeks. I tried all kinds of things - Getting Things Done, Bullet Journaling, a plethora of to-do lists, even a brief foray into org-mode, and everything in between.

Nothing stuck.

A few summers ago, however, I stumbled upon the Zettelkasten Method, and I was intrigued. If you’re not familiar, the concept can be more or less simplified to “put all your thoughts on slips and put them in a box where you can find them.” After some cursory searching, I downloaded Zettlr onto my laptop.

Knowing my history with attempting to organize anything about myself, I took only the most basic aspects I thought were relevant. I made one folder, and in it a new markdown file whenever it felt necessary. Each file contained two to three tags, and a unique ID. One file, called a “buffer” would be pinned to the top, containing a loose output stream of things that didn’t need their own files yet.

And that was it.

As I used the method, my fascination with the idea only grew. For me, the lack of rigidly defined structures, the simplicity of markdown, and the ease of navigation with tags and in-text search, made it strikingly useful.

The folder became home to my writing, my to-do lists, my ideas, my projects - everything that my prior attempts at organization had failed to contain. If I needed to move, find, back up, process, modify, or otherwise interact with any part of it, it was easy, because everything was one folder full of markdown files.

Over time, I toyed with other tools for managing it, going so far as to install Doom Emacs at one point, but most tools either didn’t do what I needed, or did far too much.

Unfortunately, my main program - Zettlr - had a fatal flaw. As the size of my Zettelkasten increased, the performance of the application diminished. Last year, I finally jumped ship for the excellent Obsidian, and I’ve since found it to be exactly what I needed, even more so than Zettlr.

The Birth of the Greenhouse

Some very recent changes in my life have allowed me to return to a number of hobbies and pursuits I’d explored in the past. In turn, this led to a large increase in the amount of text that I was putting into my Zettelkasten.

This increase in writing of all kinds, combined with the fact that my confidence regarding my own work has been growing slowly for years, led to a desire to begin to share what I was creating again.

In a pleasantly surprising turn of events, I discovered that I still had possession of this domain, a bit of internet I’ve held since 2015 that has seen various iterations and lapses over the years.

At this, everything seemed to fall into place. A static site generator would allow me to work in the same markdown format I’ve grown to love, a GitLab repository would host my pages, and my domain could simply be pointed there and served the site.

In less than four hours, I found myself here, writing this post.

Some Closing Notes

This site is still in a rough, early stage. It will almost certainly change dramatically both in the near future and as it operates for a longer period of time.

I hope, eventually, that it will bring some kind of value to someone else, or if nothing else serve as a helpful practice for me.

The Greenhouse will never contain ads. While the content herein may be my intellectual property, what good is that if no one else can read it, or it’s locked behind some morally questionable or economically prohibitive wall?

Stay tuned, do good work, and be kind.

Thank you for reading.

~Sonar