A "Now" page and public journaling experiment

This is the new and improved Digital Garden version of my “Now Page”. I now have a single Now Page, and will be calling my previous updates what they actually were: public journal updates. Moving forward you can see how my Now Page evolves using Discourse’s Edit History view, and feel free to comment there on anything in the topic at any time. Some replies may eventually seem to refer to text that is no longer there, but I think it will still be a reasonable way to handle it. Best to use the quote function if your response is particularly relevant to a particular part of the post though, as that will actually retain the context even as the current contents changes.


Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

So what’s a “Now Page”? Derek Sivers seems to have come up with the idea, which takes many forms, but it is essentially a place where people can tell you what’s going on in their lives now. For various definitions of “now”. Some people update daily or weekly, some monthly, some hardly at all. Sometimes it’s a really direct reflection of your changing experiences or priorities, sometimes more of a “broad strokes” overview, the kind of thing that might stay valid for a year even (if, say, you’re writing a novel and doing a remodel on your house).

Anyway, the idea really appealed to me when I first heard about it from a friend. So in 2019 I started my own Now Page and tried to keep it updated as much as I could. After a few months I stopped and there was a huge gap (you may eventually see those old posts archived here). Then I returned to it and kept it up for several weeks. But in both cases I was using a single blog page, so I kept overwriting the previous update. It was interesting to notice that sometimes I was lamenting having to erase something interesting or exciting (or just a fun photo) from a previous week. So I wanted to find a way to preserve each update on its own. I also wanted to enable persistent commenting that would be connected to each week’s happenings, which also wasn’t possible with a single, ever-changing blog post.

This new digital garden version neatly solves virtually all of my prior challenges with the process. But of course this too may evolve. We shall see!