A Digital Garden & Blog

Hi there, I’m Naty, the keeper of this personal site. It’s part digital garden acting as a public personal knowledge base (PKB) and part casual writing outlet / blog.

Tips On Navigating This Site

Unfortunately, Quartz relies on JavaScript heavily; therefore many features are disabled when JS in your browser is off.

Left Sidebar (or hamburger menu if you’re on mobile)

• Page title is a link going back to the homepage
• Full-text search
• Light / dark mode switch (moon or sun icon)
• Distraction-free, reading mode switch (open book icon) removes the file directory menu and table of contents. Hover over the sidebars areas to reveal (only available on desktop)
• Directory lists site content in a folder hierarchy
  • Slash pages are listed below folders
  • To view all the tags used, visit Tags

Right Sidebar

• Table of contents (only available on desktop)
  • Click on any subheading to jump to section

Centre Section

• Breadcrumb links
• Main content body with metadata:
  • Date, last modified date, word count, reading time, tags, status
• Below the content body, there is a “boxed” section:
  • Graph View is a visual map of how content is linked together based on internal links and tags used (notes organized in folders do not show up as visible links). Zoom in, pan, hover (for title), and click (to visit).
  • Backlinks lists pages that have links pointing to the page you’re currently on
  • Latest shows recently modified items

General tips

• Internal links have a highlighted background
• External links have a north-east arrow icon
• External links that points to Wikipedia have the W logo

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Site Origin

As a tinkerer and generalist who is a tech geek at heart, I love learning new tools and trying out different workflows; this web domain was where I began exploring publishing content online away from Big Tech silos and mainstream social media.

Originally, I learnt to self-host my first blog in 2022 with WordPress (WP) but the WP experience was poor and frustrating. I didn’t last long, because in 2023 I built a completely separate site, BurgeonLab.com, from scratch using Hugo, a static site generator (SSG). My Hugo site turned out to be a success because it is now my main Internet home; while my original WP blog on EclecticPassions.net was forgotten because WP stole my motivation to write.

In 2026 September, the multi-year WP hosting plan is coming to an end and I have decided to say goodbye to WP for good. By now, I’m a total SSG convert; so without a doubt, I knew I would choose an SSG for the WP migration project. This site is now built with Quartz SSG. I chose it instead of Hugo because Quartz has features catered towards Obsidian users and digital gardeners.

Why a Second Site?

While BurgeonLab.com is my primary passion project, most of the content there is quite technical. I’ve had friends and readers tell me they don’t understand or aren’t interested in such geekery!

This brings me to EclecticPassions.net; which is now my secondary online outlet with two main purposes:

1. For me to be more personal (i.e. less technical), writing day-to-day topics as blog posts. I will try my best to keep it as jargon-free as possible for improved readability, making it more suitable for a general audience.
2. As a lifelong learner, I am keen to explore the concept of “learning in public” and keeping a PKB of notes on things I am interested in and learning about.

I enjoy writing in general, and having my own website(s) helps me practice this skill. If you are not opposed to tech talk and are a geek yourself—feel free to read more of my tech explorations, web development, and IndieWeb experiments on my main site, BurgeonLab.com.

Thanks for reading. Hope you have a lovely week!

—Naty