At Front End Study Hall yesterday there was a discussion about what endeavours are similar to web development. There was a particularly rich discussion (documented in the afore-linked notes) related to gardening and web development. My takeaway from the discussion was that building for the web has more in common with other tasks than I had thought about before.

I have been thinking about one-off pages on my website that I use to document different ideas, like my ideas list or my patterns list. I keep thinking about how I should present these. Should I have a page that lists all of the pages? But what if a page isn’t ready yet? The benefit of the current way I share these pages – either directly with friends or, more commonly, by linking to them in a blog post when they are relevant – seems to work well. With the current system, I share when I am ready.

I sometimes think of these one-off pages as “wiki-like pages”, in the sense that they are updated over time – they grow. I don’t consider these pages a digital garden because they aren’t heavily linked. Many of my one-off pages stem from some notes I have taken in Apple Notes that I think, after reaching some point of maturity, should have a URL. You could call them “slash pages”, but I am not a fan of that term.

The reason I think about all these words is that they have a certain weight to them. A wiki implies something different than a digital garden, just as a page implies something different to a blog post. While “wiki-like pages” made sense to me for one-off, growing pages, “page” may be the best way for me to think of these for now.

When I consider how I want to share these pages, the best system is the one I have right now – the one where I link to pages in a blog post every so often, when I am ready. The one where I can put a URL on something without the pressure of it showing up on a list of all the pages I garden. My system is a bit inefficient, but it is maybe good enough? It is good enough for now, at least.

On reflection, there is something joyful about being able to casually share a new page in a blog post, where the page is most appropriate. The one-off pages I garden aren’t a notebook so much as they are an amalgamation of bullet points, a potential starting point – a place with more information. In blogs, I refine and define and synthesise and reflect. In pages, I often want to get the notes down so they have a home. So that I can build on the idea later.

Indeed, building on things feels very much in the spirit of having a website. We’re always building on what we have. I garden where I can. As Jeremy said in the aforementioned Front End Study Hall discussion about gardening and web development: “the joy of the thing is in the development - you cannot plan for it.”

In the spirit of talking about one-off pages, this may be a fun time to share I have a page on this website that lists songs that are related to rhubarb pie. If you have any suggestions that I can add to the list, please do let me know!