Month: May 2013

Since I am trying to blog more regularly, I am using Fargo more than I would imagine. I might write something major using it, who knows. For that matter, who knows what I mean by major. Anyway, I hovered over the + button and it popped up a label that said “New Post” so I pressed it. I’m not sure how it will be different from the posts that I have been making but I do know that it helped me to get started writing a blog post for today. That is good, no matter how well I like the New Post button. So, let’s give this a try and publish it.

The other day, I decided that it was time to update my home page. It hadn’t been updated in years and many of the links on it were stale. On a technical level, it was implemented in PHP and was ugly. I felt like it was time to update the underlying technology to something a little more in line with modern ideas about development.

My first thought was to use Rails. I had done some Rails work several years ago and had found the philosophy of configuration by convention a great improvement from the tons of XML I had to write to do a Java Server Pages site. I started investigating and discovered that I was so far behind in the Rails world that it was going to take a major effort to bring myself up to speed on all the new features. It made me question my decision to use Rails for such a “small” application.

Then I found AngularJS. What an elegant way to implement a dynamic web site. I especially liked the fact that the bulk of the compute load was shifted to the browser. The server only provided the data to feed the dynamic behavior. At last someone had implemented a framework where there was a clean separation of concerns between Model, View, and Controller. What is more, the View was implemented with carefully crafted, minimal extensions to html.

And, the most important feature of all, it was fun. I haven’t had this much fun developing in years. I also discovered the Cloud9 IDE but I’ll leave a discussion of it’s goodness for another blog post.

Today I connected Fargo to my WordPress blog and I am testing the connection. This is the first post made using this interface.

I am trying to figure out how to embed a link into a blog post. I haven’t figured it out yet. I suspect that it may involve using Markdown but I haven’t found a description of how to do it yet.

I just figured it out. Notice that Fargo in the first paragraph is a link to the Fargo site. The way that I did it is to put an html anchor markup in the outline and then with the entire node selected type clover-`. Doing it again exposes the html for editing. Pretty slick.

I could get used to this. It gives me an easy way to write my blog posts in a tool that is far more capable than anything else I’ve used. I have to admit, I am a fan of outline processors but this one sets the bar high for a new generation of outliners.