Did you stumble upon this website?

I've noticed that when someone messages me from this site, many times they mention they stumbled upon my website, or some other version meaning "I found it by chance", and this fills my heart with joy because that's the most magical way my website can be discovered, through small secret paths on the internet.

Part of sharing work on your website is it being shared through unknown paths. This reminds me of when I wrote about my website's basic (cookie-free) analytics, and how they offer a peek into how people arrived here, but don't tell the whole picture, and never will. Because what matters is the experience, how it feels to get here, and if it feels like it was by chance or luck, I feel I'm achieving a goal that analytics can't measure.

I think the essential part that makes the experience of "stumbling upon a website" is the feeling of finding something that's slightly hidden. Because even though websites are public, open to the internet and search engines, they aren't part of a platform and its algorithm. If platforms are the city center, or a busy market, a website is a remote house on a hill, so you either happen to walk by it or you have its address.

There are a couple ways in which I increase the chances of my website being found in such a way: encouraging visitors to share and "hanging flyers in the city center".

I encourage visitors to share by having a button to copy the link of a post and writing in a way that helps others, and sometimes people share it in their own internet spaces. These are hidden paths that I normally don't find out about.

And hanging flyers in the city center would be posting links to garden posts on platforms that do have algorithms. On Pinterest and on Substack.

I think another thing that makes a website feel like a hidden discovery is it being a space that feels comfortable, that people want to hang around in, explore, and come back to visit it again. And for that, a website needs to be lived-in, full of things, explorable. And so I frequently update it, write on it, add things. Not in one giant project, but in taking care of it like I would a home, little by little.