Garden Day

Summary

A live blog detailing the first 12 hours of the Garden’s existence.

Welcome to my first ever garden day build log!! It is currently 11:40am on Saturday, May 3, 2025.

Weather report:
                Overcast
       .--.     +13(11) °C     
    .-(    ).   → 35 km/h      
   (___.__)__)  16 km          
                0.0 mm

(want fun weather reports of your own? see Obsidian Setup)

Since I don’t have the space or money to build an IRL garden (yet), I’m doing the next best thing and dedicating the next 12 hours towards designing, building, and curating the first iteration of a digital garden.

(By the time you see this, there should be a link to a new page about digital gardens in the previous sentence. Click it to learn more about what it is I’m doing, and why I’m doing it!)

️ Coffee brewed; desk cleaned; plants watered. Let’s do it.

Today’s Goals and Intentions

Time: 12:00pm. Today’s vanilla lavender latte came out fantastic, killed it immediately. Already brewing another pour over now, hopefully I don’t drink it as fast lol.

bgm: Windswept Adan by Ichiko Aoba

The high-level goal of today is twofold:

design and build a platform for consolidating my knowledge in a way that could be useful to friends, family, and strangers online
as time allows: begin seeding the platform with as much of my existing knowledge as possible

In much finer detail, here’s a todo list of all the things I hope to accomplish today. I won’t be able to do all of it, but I’ll try my best!

Phase 1: setup

main page: you are here!

Start this page! [completion:: 2025-05-05]
Take care of IRL environment [completion:: 2025-05-05]
- get food for the day [completion:: 2025-05-05]
- fix coffee grinder and make some coffee [completion:: 2025-05-05]
- clean up desk and water plants [completion:: 2025-05-05]
- put phone away and set to do not disturb [completion:: 2025-05-05]

Phase 2: design

main page: Garden Design

Phase 3: Build

main page: Build Log

Obsidian-to-quartz auto deploy on push [completion:: 2025-05-05]
Clean up api.bencuan.me
- Test ratelimiting
- Fork like counter to new endpoint so I can improve it without breaking existing deployments (like notes.bencuan.me)
Integrate goatcounter to quartz [completion:: 2025-05-05]
Guestbook (isso?)
- make isso prettier
Colorful graph view
status.bencuan.me bubble (from tsh.sh)

Phase 4.0: Meta writing

Digital Gardens
History of bencuan.me (and improved colophon)
Garden Design
Life log

Phase 4.1: Content

This section has moved! Check out my Coming Soon page for the latest updates on upcoming content.

Phase 2: Design

Time: 2:09pm. intention-setting session felt great; after a quick lunch break it’s design time!!

bgm: Forever Howlong by Black Country, New Road

2:30: drew a panda!!

2:53: testing some handwritten banner fonts. I really like the offerings from Hanoded fonts (the last three)! Leaning towards choosing The Cat’s Whiskers.

3:29: mockup like buttons with Cat’s Whiskers. number only appears after you press it! (I’d like the final iteration to have hand-drawn borders too, that’ll require some css magic)

bgm: A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling by Magdalena Bay

3:58: sketchy horizontal divider! 4:25: the beginnings of layout noodling. Color scheme TBD, it’s all black and white and gray for now

The explorer, table of contents, and backlink/graph footer are all placeholders. something will eventually go in these locations, and they’ll make the page look cluttered in a similar way. I’m pretty happy with my font selection so far!
Atkinson Hyperlegible Next for sans-serif
Charter for serif
The Cat’s Whiskers for handwritten display
Fira Code NerdFont Mono for monospace
Noto Color Emoji for emojis

4:33: updated my Obsidian settings to match the new design a little more closely. (see Obsidian Setup)

5:53: after another break, back to doodling! bgm: Scenery by Ryo Fukui

6:23: added garden note category doodles!

In practice, they’ll probably look something like this: Hovering over the ”?” button will popup-link to another page explaining the different types of notes.

6:36: bottom-page like/share buttons. Debating whether to put the buttons on top of the separator or below; I think this looks ok for now.

Phase 3: Build

Main page: Build Log

bgm: A Letter from Slowboat by Ryo Fukui

My Figma doc makes me happy now! That’s a great signal to move on

(pretty minimal, but i’m not a designer and will take these w’s)

The current state of the world:

I have a functioning homelab (TurtleNet). If all goes well I won’t have to mess around with server stuff today.
bencuan.me is also up. I’ll be touching it up very minimally today, since the Garden is a different deployment altogether.
garden.bencuan.me is a stock Quartz deployment right now with no content or modifications. For the record it looks like this:
- Note the insecure icon. SSL needs some tweaking.
I’m pretty happy with my Obsidian Setup, but my current process for publishing blog posts is to manually copy paste the markdown into my site and convert it to use my custom mdx components. This won’t be sustainable for the frequency and quantity of edits that will happen in the Garden.

6:48: The first order of business is to address that last bullet point. Ideally I’ll migrate my entire Obsidian vault into the new garden repo, so all of my work will be done inside of it.

My Obsidian vault contains a lot of private information, so it’ll live as a private git submodule inside of the open-source garden code. I’ll have to configure the Obsidian git plugin properly to commit both the actual content as well as the submodule sha update.
My Obsidian vault is also currently backed up in iCloud. This shouldn’t pose any problems with the migration; I’ll just shove the garden source code into iCloud as well since it’s relatively small.

9:38: someone hit my parked car lol, classic bay area drivers :> back after the pain and suffering known as filing an insurance claim.

9:48: Successfully moved my entire vault into the garden/ folder! Everything magically works except:

Updated the daily notes plugin to point to the correct folder and template
Updated data.json in the folder icons plugin to append content/vsh to everything
Checked the ‘update submodules’ toggle in the git plugin, hopefully it works
Edited the symlink from my Documents folder to icloud so I can access it more easily: ln -s /Users/bencuan/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/garden ./garden
Run git submodule add https://github.com/64bitpandas/vsh content/vsh inside of garden

10:32: The git plugin is completely cooked. I’m removing it and just making Obsidian run a custom script whenever I hit Cmd+Shift+S:

echo $(git submodule foreach 'git add . && git commit -m "obsidian vault backup: $(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")" && git push origin HEAD' && git add . && git commit -m"vsh update: $(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")" && git push)

This is done with the “Shell Commands” plugin.
This only works because I use git for backup/publishing, not to sync between multiple devices. (I rely on iCloud to sync between my laptop and phone). As long as commits are always made from one device exclusively, everything is ok!
make sure to disable the git plugin. It force-sets git config to use the inner submodule repo as the base, rather than the outer garden one. I verified this behavior by making the Shell Commands plugin run git config --list and it showed vsh (my inner private vault) rather than garden as the upstream even though I set the working directory to garden/.

bgm: Crush by Floating Points

11:38: it works!!! (garden content itself still needs heavy cleanup— not going to be serving this as-is)

Some improvements so far:

Updated the default -d arg to content/vsh since I’m using a submodule rather than directly serving the content directory.
Added GoatCounter to quartz.config.ts:

analytics: {
      provider: "goatcounter",
      websiteId: "garden",
      host: "goatcounter.bencuan.me",
      scriptSrc: "https://goatcounter.bencuan.me/count.js",
    },

Updated the baseUrl to garden.bencuan.me

Signing off for today. I didn’t get 100% of everything I need to do, but that’s totally expected! Hope to finish up the list and get the Garden ready to release slowly over the next couple weeks :)

Explorer

Explorer

Garden Day

Table of Contents

Today’s Goals and Intentions

Phase 1: setup

Phase 2: design

Phase 3: Build

Phase 4.0: Meta writing

Phase 4.1: Content

Phase 2: Design

Phase 3: Build

Graph View

Links to this page

Links to this page

Graph View

Table of Contents