Fargo Blog

Fargo 1.69

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 19:20:42 GMT

In this release, a way of connecting from a "Fargo" outline to "myword.io".

I don't want to commit to a user interface for this at this point, so you have to be familiar with adding scripts to Fargo's menubar to make this work.

Editing the menubar

To add a command to the menubar, follow these instructions.
The command should just call this JS function: viewInMyword ()
Post questions on the Fargo2 mail list, or in a comment here.

How to use

Create a blog post in Fargo as you normally would.
Put the cursor on the main head.
Choose the command you added above.
Click on OK to view it in myword.io.
myword.io should come to the front, displaying your post.

Example

Here's an example of a myword.io rendering of a Scripting News post.

Embellishments

Add an img attribute on main headline to replace the Beatles image.
Add a description att on the main headline, to add a description.
If you aren't using Markdown, add an att named flMarkdown set false.

Rolling on the river

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 16:00:21 GMT

This feature will be of interest to people who have "River.js" files. This is the output format of "River4" and previous river-of-news aggregators.

In Fargo 1.68 there's a new <includeRiver%> macro. It takes one parameter, the http address of a River.js file.

<%includeRiver ("http://rss.scripting.com/rivers/iowa.js")%>

Testing it out

You can use my personal river. The NYT river is also useful for testing.

I included my personal river on today's Scripting News home page, with hilarious results. Not saying this is particularly useful, but it's really nice when two big pieces of technology "just work", in this case, they worked the first time I tried it. Hala.

Tina Turner would like to sing you a song

Fargo and OPML, Evernote, Radio3

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 15:25:13 GMT

On Twitter, Frank Meeuwsen asks a good question about Fargo.

"Would it be possible to update a Fargo Outline from within Dropbox? So add/update directly in a folder instead of the editor?"

Yes

I answered, yes no problem with that. OPML is a text-based format. Just edit the text in whatever you want, and save it to the folder.

The best way to learn about OPML is to create something in "Fargo", save it, and then drag the file onto a plain text editor and see what it generated. Fargo doesn't care how the text gets there. So you just have to produce what it's expecting. I tried to design the elements so if you think about it, you'll figure out what it's doing. And I'm happy to answer any questions people have, to the extent that I can.

Connecting with Evernote

What's interesting is that Frank is an Evernote business consultant, and Evernote is a service that Fargo and our other products should hook up to. Imagine "Radio3" able to post to Evernote alongside Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and RSS. That's the philosophy of these products. Let's make users' data flow smoothly. There's a lot of untapped potential here.

Fargo outage cleared

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 17:05:53 GMT

We had an outage starting at approximately 2AM Eastern this morning that just cleared, at 1PM.

There was a problem with the Dropbox API. It was saying every call Fargo was an error.

I posted a status report on the outage almost immediately before it cleared.

Glad to have "Fargo" back!

Interim fix

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 01:30:45 GMT

No version number change for this fix.

"Fargo" would fail on startup if you left the cursor on the first line in the outline.

Fixed.

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 20:00:42 GMT

"Little Outliner", "Happy Friends" and "Thesaurus Land" also have this feature.

Fargo 1.66

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 17:35:40 GMT

The simplest of features

"Fargo" now remembers the bar cursor location when it saves an outline. It automatically restores the cursor when the outline is reopened.

Technical details

There's a new <head> element in the OPML that Fargo produces, <lastCursor>.

Its value is a number, the number of times you have to move the cursor flatdown from the summit, after the previously expanded elements are expanded.

Other outliner-based apps

"Little Outliner", "Happy Friends" and "Thesaurus Land" also have this feature.

Fargo 1.65

Fri, 01 Aug 2014 17:41:16 GMT

Updated "Fargo" to use Font Awesome 4.1 with 71 new icons.

Thankfully, the Font Awesome updates go pretty easily these days.

You can use the new icons with the icon macro.

Example: <%icon ("bomb")%> produces a <%icon ("bomb")%> icon (obviously).

Fargo 1.64

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 17:08:08 GMT

An alternative to Markdown in outlines

I missed having expanding outlines, and I want to use the structure in interesting ways in RSS, so I decided to add a small feature to Fargo, that lets us edit outlines as they will be presented, with structure.
This blog post is an example of such an outline. As is the one you're reading now. ;-)

How to

To give it a try, create a headline of type outline with the big + icon in the left margin.
In the Attribute editor (click on the Suitcase icon in the left margin) add an attribute called flMarkdown, with the value false. When you're done the atts should look like this screen shot.
Then add some outline material under the headline. It's important to indent a few times and add structure, or else it'll look exactly like the Markdown-style posts.
When you click the Eye icon to view it, it should have wedges that you can click to expand and collapse the outline structure.

Attributes

There are a few attributes you can use to control the way outlines are rendered. They're explained below.
leftIndent attribute

If you put a leftIndent attribute, a number, on a headline, all its subs, and their subs will be indented by that number of pixels. The default is 0.

collapse attribute

If you put a collapse attribute on a headline, its subs are initially collapsed. This lets you control the presentation.

img attribute

A URL, points to an image, which is added to the headline, floating to the right.

url attribute

If present it's where you go when the image is clicked on, if there is an img attribute.

Outlines in RSS items

Each item now has an outline element that contains most of the structure and attributes of the outline.
We don't include comments.
We don't include two attributes: isFeedItem (they are all true, because it's in a feed) and isComment (again, all true, because comments are not included).
The outlines are in the new source namespace. What you'll see in the feed is <source:outline>.

RSS fixes

In 1.63 we added macro and glossary processing to the RSS feed builder, but the processing was done in the wrong place. The result is that unencoded XML could end up in description and title elements. This is not legal XML. In 1.64 we do it selectively, before encoding, only in title and description elements.
We also evaluate Emoji codes in the feed.

Fix relating to tweets

When we introduced the tweet type it broke the eye icon. If a document contained a tweet, it sent you to a non-existent page when you click the eye.

Fargo 1.63

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 20:56:56 GMT

While I'm waiting for Facebook to approve the new version of "little card editor" I thought I'd do a little diversion to solve what has been a thorny problem in Fargo that has prevented a lot of interesting things from happening.

The feed has no pagetable

When you're rendering the RSS feed for a site, there is no context for the rendering. This means that none of the preferences for the site are available to the RSS building process. And it means there's no way to use attributes to configure the RSS building process. This has held back a bunch of interesting development.

Idea

So how about this. The pagetable for the RSS building process is built from the global settings, plus the user's cmsPrefs.opml file (if there is one) plus the top level of the site whose feed it is. That gives us three levels of attributes, one that applies to all Fargo sites, one that applies to all the user's Fargo sites, and for the site that the RSS is from. Let's give it a try and see if it works.

Testing

Okay the feature is in. Now let's see how it works. :-)
Here are some glossary items from my cmsPrefs.opml: "Happy Friends", "Emoji", "Little Card Editor".
Here are some glossary items from the global file: "cheesecake" :-) :-(
And one from the Fargo blog outline: "cmsPrefs.opml"
If the new feature worked, when we look in the RSS file, they should all be evaluated.
One more thing, let's check a pagetable macro: <%opmlOwnerName%>.
Here's what this text looked like in Fargo.
And here's what it looks like in the feed.

Fargo 1.62

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 14:28:21 GMT

There's one major feature in this release, the ability to render tweets.

A tweet is a headline whose type is tweet. They can appear in any kind of page, of any type.

They will be rendered correctly in pages of the following types: outline, html, stream, presentation, markdown, bloghome.

This is the Fargo side of the connection with "Happy Friends".

There is a blog post on the Happy Friends site that explains the hookup from that side.

How to use a Happy Friends outline in Fargo

Basically...

Get the outline from Happy Friends.
Choose Open by URL in the File menu. Enter the outline from step 1.
That gets you an outline with tweets in Fargo.
Copy and paste those into your outlines in Fargo, and render as normal.

The tweets should show up in your pages as they do in mine.

For a more detailed narrative, with an example, see this post on yesterday's Scripting News.

Fargo 1.61

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 21:45:21 GMT

Fixed a problem where the CMS would think it was seeing emojis in the part of the stream template responsible for phone and tablet-size screens.

Thanks to Jason Cobb for spotting the problem.

You should rebuild any pages that rely on the stream template.

Be sure to reload the "Fargo" app before doing so.

Fargo 1.60

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 12:40:18 GMT

A new release of Fargo today with one small feature, Emojis.

A good friend showed them to me, a few weeks ago on a trip to San Francisco. I was immediately won over. Charmed by them. It's a new fun language.

Colorful and cute and somewhat irreverent.

Syntax

The best part is that there's a syntax for Emojis in text-based apps like Fargo.

For example, :baseball: gets you the Emoji for

There's a list of all the codes on the Emoji Cheat Sheet.

As you can see this syntax is already supported by lots of famous apps including Campfire and GitHub. Add "Fargo" to the list.

Turning it off and on

The new Emoji feature is on by default, you can turn it off with a # attribute:

#flEmojify "false"

Thanks to

We're using the Emojify toolkit. It went in real easy. Thank you.

Commands to turn images on and off

Tue, 20 May 2014 18:12:54 GMT

I have commands in the Links menu on Scripting News that turn images on and off.

You may want to add these commands to the menu of your website, so users can have the option to have images on. It's also useful for debugging.

Here's an OPML file with the two commands. Open the file in Fargo, copy the commands and paste them into the menu you want to add them to.

Fargo 1.59

Tue, 20 May 2014 16:20:24 GMT

Stream 2

With this release there's a second version of the stream template, and the CMS generates a slightly different structure for streams. The JavaScript code in the stream template has been changed accordingly.

A quieter stream

I did an experiment over the weekend, adding a command to Scripting News that turned off background images. I tried it, and immediately wanted to keep them off. The text is much easier to read. And that matters a lot. I wanted to get some experience with images in the background, and I did get that experience. It'll show up again in another context. And you can still have the images now, if you want them. So that's good. Nothing went away, the defaults changed.

Demo

"Scripting News" is the demo.

If you want the old version

Add #streamVersion "1" in your cmsPrefs.opml file. You should get the same behavior as before v1.59.

If you want the new version, you shouldn't have to do a thing.

A list of changes

Here's a list of technical changes that were made. If you don't care you can skip this part.

We don't generate the .divStreamTopSpacer element.

Copied fonts into fargo.io/code. Faster loading, not relying on Google servers, avoid possible breakage issue.

Section heads are bold, Ubuntu.

Increase density of foreground text. It's opacity goes from .9 to .98. Also background color changes from white to whitesmoke. Border color goes a little darker to gainsboro.

divStreamDay needs styles for background image

added these styles:

-webkit-background-size: cover;

-moz-background-size: cover;

-o-background-size: cover;

background-size: cover;

background-position: center;

background-repeat: no-repeat;

divStreamDayImage goes away

in first version, if there was a backgroundImage att on the day, we'd generate a divStreamDayImage element with the background image as its background.

in the new version, we don't do this. the backgroundImage data is on the day div, and we can add the image at render-time

Fargo 1.58

Thu, 15 May 2014 21:23:47 GMT

One small fix in this release

There's just one very small change in this release, that may fix a problem people are having with dates in noteblog-style blogs. I don't have a set of steps to create the problem on my system, that's why I'm not sure if this is the fix or not, but I did find a problem.

Use the big gray plus icon to create posts

One thing that was clear from reviewing the CMS code, you won't get good results with stream types if you make the calendar entries by hand.

You should use the big gray plus icon at the top of the icon bar at the left of the window to create new blog entries. It automatically sets the attributes up the way the CMS is expecting them.

If you don't use the plus to create blog entries, you may see problems with dates. This may have been responsible for some of the problems we've been seeing.

Little Outliner 1.40

Tue, 13 May 2014 15:01:11 GMT

The last release of "Little Outliner" was in April 2013. After so much time, it had become dated, in need of a refresh. That's the point of this release, version 1.40.

What?

Here's a brief explanation for newbies.

Changes

The Outliner menu above the outline display has been replaced with the menubar we use in "Fargo".
In addition to the Outliner menu, there's now a Reorg menu and a Docs menu.
The Arrow Pad from Fargo has been added. The command to activate it is in the Reorg menu.
The clock was removed.
The explanatory text at the bottom of the page was removed, and replaced with a What is this? link that takes you to a full page description of Little Outliner.
The copyright notice was updated.

Fargo on NPR

Mon, 12 May 2014 13:25:07 GMT

Yes, Fargo was on NPR this morning, in a story about a new site called Glass that's edited, and presented, as a Fargo outline.

I've linked to the new site and the NPR report on today's Scripting News.

It's very exciting. Lots of new users today, and I'm hearing from all kinds of old friends who didn't know about Fargo.

The people at Quartz who are doing this site are incredible, innovators, brilliant, and hard-working. We had a lot of fun with this project but I didn't really have to do anything but answer questions, Fargo really works.

Setting page title on deep links

Sun, 11 May 2014 23:38:12 GMT

When you click on one of the # links on a stream page, it takes you to that section of the archive page for the day, with the item whose # you clicked on highlighted.

Now it also sets the title of the page with the text of the item.

So if you click on today's News startups nothing special, if you look at the title of the page, it should read Scripting News: [News startups nothing special].

If you use a linkblogging tool to point to this, it will automatically be populated with the correct text for pointing to the article. We even add the square brackets so it will be correctly linked if the linkblogging tool is Fargo.

I love to sharpen the edges products to this level of detail. It takes time to figure out where they need adjusting, but we've already been using the stream type for a couple of months.

Setting frame color on stream types

Sun, 11 May 2014 18:24:46 GMT

Sometimes when I use a background image on "Scripting News", I want the frame of the text to pick up a color element of the image. I just wanted to set the color of the frame.

This could be done with a custom #style directive, but this comes up so often, I wanted a shortcut for it, so I added one.

Now you can set #streamTextFrameColor to the color you want to use.

I do it in today's Scripting News, if you want an example. The color is set to gold.

I also took this opportunity to update the GitHub repository for Fargo templates.

Cameron Hocking on Fargo in Education

Sat, 10 May 2014 21:42:48 GMT

It's great to see people starting to use Fargo in education!

http://hocking.smallpict.com/2014/05/10/fargoInEducation.html

Dave

General bug reporting note

Thu, 08 May 2014 22:37:29 GMT

If you think Fargo isn't behaving correctly, it's often a good idea to try reloading the app.

When reporting a problem, be sure to tell people what version you're using. It's possible the problem was fixed in a release that you haven't installed yet.

To install a new version of the app, just reload "fargo".

I did some work on my noteblog

Mon, 05 May 2014 03:19:28 GMT

Yellow was too bright

A few notes about scripting.com.

I thought yellow was too bright a color for highlights, so I changed it to gold, by adding this directive at the top level of my site outline:

You can use any of the pre-defined web colors, or any value that can be used as a color in a web page.

Bold-face sub-heads

I wanted the headlines with subs to be bold and in a nice serif font. So I added a #style directive.

You can see how I made these changes by opening the outline I use to edit the noteblog.

My feed changed

I changed the main feed for scripting.com to the one of my noteblog. This means that people who subscribe to my site in a feed reader will now get title-less items and titled items.

This is good news for other people who use "Fargo", because any site that handles my feed well, will also do well with yours. It also means other blogging tools can allow users to enter title-less items, which is good if you think Twitter could use a little competition, as I do. I think this will be important for news organizations as well.

Fargo 1.57

Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:12:13 GMT

Render icon goes away

A couple of minor changes in this release.

A new icon was introduced in the first beta of Fargo 2, but it was never completely implemented, and in practice isn't very useful. The space will be better used, and space in the left margin is limited.

Date bug in stream style sites

There was a bug in the stream sites, reported by Lloyd Davis, where the date displayed on a day's post would be incorrect. There was a call to the date formatter in the CMS that didn't include information about the user's timezone. I checked all the other calls and they appear to be correct.

Fargo Publisher 0.95

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:19:16 GMT

New in this release is the ability to write your own request handlers in JavaScript.

I added this feature because I wanted to try writing my own handlers without having to update Fargo Publisher.

How it works

If a request comes in that doesn't match any of the built-in functions, we check the scripts sub-folder of the data folder. If an item matches, we eval it and return the result.

How matching works: If the request is for /xyz then we look for xyz.js.

We convert the request to lowercase, so that requests are case-insensitive, however the files in the folder must have all lowercase names.

Error handling

If we don't find it, we return 404. If there's a script error we return a 503.

Example

If the script is in count.js and the server is running at pub.fargo.io, you'd access it through this URL: http://pub.fargo.io/count. You can try it, click the link. Reload the page. Every time you load it, the count should increment.

globals is a global object that you can hang persistent values on. They persist for the life of the server, when it's rebooted it's reset. You can think of it as a scratchpad.

Read the source

Here's the source for the server. To find the part that implements this, search for 404. We look in the scripts folder before calling it a Not Found error.

Blog post

I wrote a bit about this on Scripting News.

Fargo Blog

Fargo 1.69

Editing the menubar

How to use

Example

Embellishments

Rolling on the river

Testing it out

Tina Turner would like to sing you a song

Fargo and OPML, Evernote, Radio3

Yes

Connecting with Evernote

Fargo outage cleared

Interim fix

Fargo 1.66

The simplest of features

Technical details

Other outliner-based apps

Fargo 1.65

Fargo 1.64

Fargo 1.63

Fargo 1.62

How to use a Happy Friends outline in Fargo

Fargo 1.61

Fargo 1.60

Syntax

Turning it off and on

Thanks to

Commands to turn images on and off

Fargo 1.59

Stream 2

A quieter stream

Demo

If you want the old version

A list of changes

Fargo 1.58

One small fix in this release

Use the big gray plus icon to create posts

Little Outliner 1.40

What?

Changes

Archives

Fargo on NPR

Setting page title on deep links

Setting frame color on stream types

Cameron Hocking on Fargo in Education

General bug reporting note

I did some work on my noteblog

Yellow was too bright

Bold-face sub-heads

My feed changed

Fargo 1.57

Render icon goes away

Date bug in stream style sites

Fargo Publisher 0.95

How it works

Error handling

Example

Read the source

Blog post