Naty's Eclectic Passions

About

2026-09-08906 words (5 mins)
Dithered photo of Naty

Picture of Naty hiking in Hong Kong

Author

Naty S is a trained healthcare professional and avid multi-hobbyist. She’s a home barista, street photographer, tech tinkerer, car detailer, open source enthusiast, data privacy advocate, IndieWeb proponent, and more.

Based in Hong Kong SAR, she is passionate about sharing her experiences and knowledge with others through her websites. You’ll find her active on Mastodon; engaging with the like-minded individuals and the small web community.

She’s known around the Internet as @eclecticpassions, @burgeonlab or @aperture2iris.

(Writing in third person always sounds weird to me; I’m glad that’s over!)

Colophon

I used these tools to build this site:

AI Usage

TL;DR: No generative AI tools are used on any photographs or written words produced by me, on this site and anywhere for that matter.

The only place generative AI is used on this site is for assisting me to customize the function and appearance to my liking.2

As for all the writing, they’re completely my words, 100% human-made! To catch spelling and grammar mistakes, I use LanguageTools (the free self-hosted version).3

The following two sections will go over how I organize my writing on this site.

1. The Garden Layout

The idea of a digital garden has intrigued me for the longest time, and I want to give it a shot in 2026. What is it? you might ask. Digital gardening involves tending to non-chronological, evolving notes of interest to the “gardener”.

The process involves developing rudimentary ideas through repeated reiteration by adding new knowledge and forming links between notes. Whereas typical blog posts are more of a “write-and-forget” process that captures only one moment in time. Another term for digital gardening with similar connotations is a personal wiki.

Note Status

Notes in digital gardens are often categorized based on how developed they are, i.e., the phase a note is in. I have settled on these for now:

  1. 🌱 Seed — A thought or idea, with minimal framework, ready to be developed into something more
  2. 🪴 Growing — Structure is set, but content and ideas are still being gathered and organized
  3. 🌲 Evergreen — Comprehensive notes that feel “complete” with a developed network of bi-directional links around the topic
  4. 🍂 Archived — No longer active or maintained

The note status is located near the top of each page where other metadata are displayed:

Published date, modified date, word count, read time, tags, status

Appeals of Digital Gardening

  • Removes the pressure of presenting a single piece of cohesive writing ready for publishing
  • All notes start as a stub or 🌱 seed status; meaning there’s room for growth, allowing time for the idea to develop into a more cohesive piece
  • The fact that notes in a digital garden must start of as seeds—meaning it’s acceptable they’re rough and unfinished—this helps with my perfectionism tendencies as they’re not meant to be perfect from the get-go

Note Tags and Folders

Being a new digital gardener, I am still exploring the best way to keep the notes organized in a way that makes sense to me and possible readers. My current plan is to use tags for topics and use folders (minimally) to group spanning areas.

Note Format

Lists will probably be what I use the most for notes.4 Prose feels more suitable for blogs (but this whole site/garden is my experimental playground, so nothing is set in stone). This leads me to the second type of writing you will find here.

2. Blog Section

Redesigning this site from the ground up, with a big focus on digital gardening, means that blog articles will be more of an adjunct. I decided to keep a blog section mainly for the old migrated blogs from my retired WordPress.

Article Tags

Blog articles are categorized into three main types:

  1. #Remarks — Thoughts on current events or topics of interest
  2. #Reviews — Non-sponsored, non-generated, human reviews of products or services I personally use
  3. #Ruminations — Subjective, opinionated, personal ramblings

All blog articles written prior to 2026 will have a 🍂 retired status as they’re not actively maintained, to keep with the practice of statuses of digital gardens.

Want More?

Since EclecticPassions.net is my secondary site, it is not as comprehensive. Visit BurgeonLab.com if you want to learn more or find me elsewhere on the Links page.

Footnotes

  1. This is an affiliate link. If you try it and become a paying member, a kickback is received which helps with hosting needs. Thank you for your support! Learn more about my Bunny.net experience. ↩

  2. As an amateur web developer who is self-taught by experimenting with Hugo and WordPress, I managed to learn a good amount of HTML, CSS, and some vanilla JS. But this was not enough when I decided to move to Quartz which is based heavily on NodeJS, React and Typescript; which is very much out of my depth. Without LLMs or tools like DeepWiki to troubleshoot and figure how things are done, I wouldn’t have been able to create this site the way I want. ↩

  3. I’ve written a guide on my main blog on how to set up your own Grammarly alternative for free. ↩

  4. An inspiring list collection is the one by the late Anthony Bourdain. ↩

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