Digital gardens eschew reverse chronological sorting

Reverse is the curse!

When I read the materials that served as the inspiration to start this garden (linked here), one of the things that most viscerally resonated with me was the abhorrence of "reverse chronological sort". Fuck reverse chronological sort.

First, it assumes that the most recently written thing is the most pertinent for a reader or most interesting. Well clearly, that's not always true. It's an extremely flimsy invariant. RCS doesn't allow an author to put his or her best foot forward, because instead of presenting the most comprehensive or most rivetting piece in a collection, it simply shows you the most recent.

Also, RCS has a chilling effect on blog authors. Every post is sitting there, with it's date. You're always called to add something to that stack of posts, put something right on the top. If you're not writing a fully formed idea that you can post, why bother? Digital gardens allow for subtle and small "weed picking" and "watering" operations that work on a scale smaller than "publish a whole, finished, blog post".

On the other hand, I have had some trouble integrating old blog posts into the digital garden. Similarly, I've had issues with not feeling right about posting something because it doesn't "fit" anywhere in the garden. To alleviate some of this, I've come up with the compost pile, which is just a collection of garden nodes that don't really fit anywhere. I can put things there temporarily and come back to them, and the list of items is not in any kind of chronological order.