How it works

• Some files are encrypted, most probably aren't.

• You can't encrypt files that are published.

• There's a single encryption password used for all the outline documents you choose to encrypt in Fargo.

To set the password

• Choose Settings from the system menu, the one with your name, in the right corner of the menu bar.

• Click on the Advanced tab. Screen shot.

• Enter the password and click OK.

Pick a good password

• Once you've encrypted files, it's not easy to change the password, so pick a good one.

• It should be memorable, but not easy to guess.

• Do not store the password in your Dropbox folder.

For each file you want to encrypt

• Activate its tab.

• Choose Outline Settings in the File menu.

• Click on the Encrypt tab. Screen shot.

• Click the checkbox and click OK.

• Make a change to the file to cause it to be saved or choose Save from the File menu.

How to be sure it's encrypted

• In the file system open an OPML file you encrypted with Notepad or Text Edit. It should be a JSON file, not an OPML file. It contains the OPML, encrypted.

• Here's a screen shot of one of my test files after it's been encrypted.

How to test

• Reload Fargo. It should open all the previously open tabs, including the one you encrypted. It should look exactly the same in Fargo, even though in Dropbox it's unreadable. That's the encryption working.

To use it on other machines

• Enter the same password in the Settings dialog and open files as you would normally.

• You should get a dialog if you try to open an encrypted file with the wrong password saying there was an encryption error.

If you need to change the password

• Open all of your encrypted files.

• Change the password in the Settings dialog.

• Make changes to each of the files to force them to be saved.

The encryption we use

• We use the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library.

• Just plugged right in, couldn't be simpler.

How secure is this encryption?

• I'm not an encryption expert, in any manner of speaking, so the honest answer is I don't know. If you spot any problems please let us know.

Do we store the password on our server?

• No. We don't really have a server to store the password on.

• Fargo is a static JavaScript app that loads from an S3 bucket.

• All the processing takes place on your machine, including the encryption.

• The password is stored in HTML 5 local storage, on your machine. It is not transmitted.

See also

• Scripting News: Encryption in Fargo 1.14.

• Scripting News: A light-hearted use-case for encryption.

Video demo