Playing in the Dirt

Ideas are tricky things. They come to you with often grand notions of what they can end up being, but they rarely come with instruction manuals on how to get from concept to completion.

This was my struggle today. I started trying to put together this digital garden page, and I quickly ran into limitations. Mostly my own limitations. But also limitations on the platforms I was using. And I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s a problem of approach.

In my head, I’m picturing this: a landing page of sorts that serves as the entry point into the garden, containing sub-categories with links to pages for each entry. Seems simple enough, yes? And it very well may be. But I can’t seem to get from A to B on it yet.

I think one of the main things holding up progress is how fixated I am on the back-end of the whole thing. I’d like this whole thing to be somewhat self-encapsulated. What I don’t want is to build a ton of individual pages that are held together simply with a bunch of hyperlinks. My main concern there is that I might at some point become overwhelmed with pages that have no organizational structure within my editing software.

What I want is folders. And maybe there’s a way to get there, but I haven’t quite worked it out just yet. But I am pretty sure that’s what I’d like. An expandable “Digital Garden” folder that would contain all the sub-pages so I could get to them easily and edit as required. So maybe not even folders, but definitely sub-pages. And I’m sure there’s a way to get there. I’m just struggling with it.

And here I am of two minds. A very stubborn part of me wants to keep digging until I find this solution. Especially because I’m sure it’s something I just haven’t come across yet, and there must exist out there in the vast interwebs the exact solution to my particular problem. But there is also the part of me that started this blog in the first place. The part of me that says perfect is the enemy of good, and that I should just do now what I can with the tools and knowledge that I have.

After all, things can only be improved once you’ve built them.

So fair warning. This will likely be ugly when I’m done with the initial setup. But the whole point of this project is that I won’t be done. Right now I’m playing in the dirt, knowing I’ll get dirty. But the point is to make something. And that will give me something to work on improving down the road.