§ masterplan.md
Digital Garden Notebook
An editorial, wiki-like personal site where notes grow from seedlings to evergreen articles with backlinks and graph views.
01
App overview and objectives
A personal knowledge site where notes are planted as seedlings and grow into evergreen essays, connected by backlinks and browsable as a graph. It is publishing as gardening rather than as broadcasting.
02
The problem worth solving
Blogs punish unfinished thinking, so most notes die in private files. Explicit growth stages give permission to publish early and improve in public, which is how ideas actually mature.
03
Target audience
- Primary — Engineers, researchers and writers building a public body of thinking.
- Secondary — Readers who arrive from search and follow links deeper into a topic.
04
Roles and permissions
- Visitor — read-only public pages, can sign up.
- Member — owns their own records, cannot see other users' data.
05
Core features
- Notes with a growth stage (seedling, budding, evergreen) shown honestly
- Wiki-style bidirectional links with hover previews
- Graph view of the whole garden, filterable by tag and stage
- Full-text search with keyboard-first navigation
- Last-tended date and revision history per note
- RSS and email digest of newly tended notes
Deliberately later
- Public comments or annotations
- Multi-author gardens
- Import from markdown vaults
06
Technical stack
Static generation from markdown files with a build-time link graph, deployed on a CDN.
Why: Content is read-heavy and rarely changes; building the backlink graph once at build time makes every page instant and perfectly indexable.
Alternatives: A database-backed CMS (easier live editing, slower and more moving parts) or a hosted note tool with publishing (zero work, no ownership of design or URLs).
07
Conceptual data model
Note — slug, title, body, stage, tags, planted_on, tended_on
Link — source note, target note, context sentence
Tag — name, description, note count
Revision — note, timestamp, summary of change
08
Integrations
- Search index
- RSS and email digest
- Optional web analytics
09
UI design principles
- Reading experience first: 65-75 character measure, strong serif headings, real typographic hierarchy.
- Images are captioned and credited; pull-quotes break long passages.
- Navigation stays out of the way while reading and reappears on scroll-up.
10
Security considerations
- Draft notes excluded from the build so private thinking never leaks.
- No user accounts means almost no attack surface.
- Content licence stated clearly on every page.
11
Development phases
Phase 1 — Prove the core
- — Notes with a growth stage (seedling, budding, evergreen) shown honestly
- — Wiki-style bidirectional links with hover previews
- — Graph view of the whole garden, filterable by tag and stage
- — Static content and design system in place
- — Basic analytics
Phase 2 — Make it real
- — Full-text search with keyboard-first navigation
- — Last-tended date and revision history per note
- — RSS and email digest of newly tended notes
- — Accounts, sign-in and password reset
- — Empty, loading and error states everywhere
Phase 3 — Polish and launch
- — Performance, accessibility and SEO pass
- — Legal pages, contact route and 404 handling
- — Wire up: Search index
- — Wire up: RSS and email digest
Phase 4 — Grow
- — Public comments or annotations
- — Multi-author gardens
- — Import from markdown vaults
12
Challenges and solutions
Risk — Graph view is pretty but useless
Solution — Treat it as a secondary navigation aid; search and tag lists remain primary.
Risk — Orphan notes accumulate
Solution — Build-time report of notes with no inbound links, surfaced to the author.
Risk — Perfectionism blocks publishing
Solution — Seedling stage is celebrated visually rather than apologised for.
13
Future expansion
- Collaborative gardens
- Citation export
- AI-assisted linking suggestions
14
Page list (13 pages)
- 01 PUBLIC Garden — Entry point: recently tended notes and the main paths in.
- 02 PUBLIC Seedlings — Rough, early notes.
- 03 PUBLIC Evergreens — Mature, maintained essays.
- 04 PUBLIC Graph — Visual map of connections.
- 05 PUBLIC About — How the garden works and who tends it.
- 06 AUTH Sign up — Create an account with email or a social provider.
- 07 AUTH Log in — Return to the account, with error and lockout states.
- 08 AUTH Reset password — Request a reset link and set a new password.
- 09 APP (signed in) Account settings — Profile, email, password, language and delete account.
- 10 PUBLIC Contact — Contact form plus real address, phone and email.
- 11 LEGAL & SYSTEM Privacy policy — What data is collected, why, and how to remove it.
- 12 LEGAL & SYSTEM Terms of service — Rules of use, liability and account termination.
- 13 LEGAL & SYSTEM 404 not found — Friendly dead end with search and links back.
15
Page map
PUBLIC AUTH APP (signed in) LEGAL & SYSTEM ───────────── ───────────────── ─────────────────── ─────────────────── ├─ Garden ├─ Sign up └─ Account settings ├─ Privacy policy ├─ Seedlings ├─ Log in ├─ Terms of service ├─ Evergreens └─ Reset password └─ 404 not found ├─ Graph ├─ About └─ Contact key flows: Garden ──▶ Seedlings Garden ──▶ Evergreens Seedlings ──▶ Evergreens Graph ──▶ Garden