Consumer (but that barely covers it, our product is used by individuals, professionals, teachers, in all walks of live).
<%blogHomeDescription%>
The title of this post contains a link
This time I want to see if I can get the RSS generator to strip markup from titles.
Some people are putting links in their text, which is totally legit, but it screws up most RSS processors to have markup in titles.
Anyway, we're now stripping markup from titles in the feed.
Also when generating the name attribute.
And with this post we now have a proper link to the feed embedded in every page on this site.
The new macro is called rssLink (). If there is a feed element in the head of the OPML, we generate the link. If the element isn't there, we return the empty string.
<%rssLink ()%>
It's meant to be included in the head section of the template. I have it in mine, and it will be in the new versions of the default templates when we're ready with those.
This post has some HTML markup in it
If the fix I just added works, the feed should have it properly encoded.
Here's some bold text.
Here's a link to a blog post I wrote yesterday.
I wonder if it will work (there was some italic text there).
A great song is Rosalinda's Eyes by Billy Joel.
I can always find my Cuban skies in Rosalinda's eyes.
I'd do anything to take away her tears.
How to write a blog post with Fargo
One of the many new things you can do with Fargo is create blog posts.
To create a blog post so others can view it, you must have a public place to put it. In Fargo, those are called named outlines.
If you have a named outline, please open it now. If not, here's how you can create one.
1. Choose the New command from the File menu.
2. Enter a title, something like My Public Outline. Click OK.
3. Enter a little bit of text in the first headline, and click the Save button in the right margin if you don't have autosave turned on.
4. Choose Name Outline from the File menu. Your name must be at least 4 characters long, and be unique. You'll get feedback from Fargo as you enter the name.
With your named outline open, you're now ready to create a blog post!
1. Create a new headline by clicking on the big plus icon in the left margin. Enter the title of your blog post, something like Welcome to my blog!
2. Indent by pressing the tab key, and enter the text of your post.
3. Put the cursor on the top headline, click the Eye icon in the left margin. A new tab should open in your browser, and with any luck you'll see your post.
4. Copy the url from the title bar of the browser and send it to your friends.
5. That's all there is!
Fargo automatically creates an RSS feed for every named outline.
Change in the way RSS is built in Fargo
I just made a change to the way the RSS is built.
Previously, the only time we'd add a <link> element to an RSS item is if the headline was of type link. Otherwise we'd use the <guid> element, and its value would be the permalink to the item.
For some aggregators, apparently, this was not enough.
So now we add the <link> element if there is a permalink possible, and the information appears twice in the item.
Hopefully our feeds should work with more aggregators now.
How to create a presentation in Fargo
One of the many new things you can do with Fargo is create and view presentations in outlines.
Here's an example of a presentation I created.
Now I want to show you how to do it too.
To publish a presentation so others can view it you must have a public place to put it. In Fargo, those are called named outlines.
If you have a named outline, please open it now. If not, here's how you can create one.
1. Choose the New command from the File menu.
2. Enter a title, something like My Public Outline. Click OK.
3. Enter a little bit of text in the first headline, and click the Save button in the right margin if you don't have autosave turned on.
4. Choose Name Outline from the File menu. Your name must be at least 4 characters long, and be unique. You'll get feedback from Fargo as you enter the name.
With your named outline open, you're now ready to create a presentation!
1. Create a new headline by clicking on the big plus icon in the left margin. Enter the title of your presentation, something like My First Presentation.
2. Under that headline, enter the titles of your slides. For your first experiment make it something easy like Slide 1, Slide 2, Slide 3.
3. Under each slide, enter some text. This is what will appear on each slide.
4. Now, put the cursor on the headline created in the first step. Click on the suitcase icon in the left margin. These are the attributes that are attached to the headline. You can edit them. There should be an item called type. Change its value to presentation and click OK. Screen shot.
5. Again, with the cursor on the same headline, click the Eye icon in the left margin. A new tab should open in your browser, and with any luck you'll see your presentation.
6. Click the left and right arrow keys to move through the presentation.
You can make changes, and they will be immediately reflected in the public presentation. You can make as many as you like and share them with your colleagues.
I wish I had something to say.
I'm just typing into an outline
So you can see how easy it is...
Just follow the easy instructions!
Contact from Product (name, email):
Dave Winer, dave@smallpicture.com
Contact from Marketing / PR (name, email):
Dave Winer, dave@smallpicture.com
Spokesperson at DBX (name, email):
Dave Winer, dave@smallpicture.com
Product Integration with Dropbox:
Name of product being integrated with Dropbox (if different to company name)
Fargo is a simple idea outliner, notepad, todo list, project organizer.
It's an HTML 5 application, written in JavaScript, runs in any compatible browser, including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft IE 10.
Describe your product integration with Dropbox (or potential of the integration)
The users' files are stored in Dropbox, using the Dropbox API. They are accessible anywhere Dropbox is. You can share files with other users, or publicly.
Impact on the end user (realized or anticipated impact)
User has access to all their data, no need to export.
Their outlines are available everywhere, instantly.
Their work can be published using Dropbox as the back-end, and Fargo as the CMS.
Please provide an approved quote we can use about the product integration. This may be featured in a blog post or press release.
Dropbox is a deeply transformative and open networked storage environment. Because Fargo is built around Dropbox, users don't have to export their data. It's all sitting in a folder on their desktop (and tablet, smartphone, desktop, server, you name it).
Other developers have to worry about synchronization. We don't. That's all taken care of by Dropbox from Day One.
We used to say the network is the computer, but we're seeing more and more that Dropbox is the computer. Once some data is available in my Dropbox, the question of which computer does what is entirely fungible.
Totally and unconditionally!
Company description: short and/or long form
Small Picture is a privately held company founded by Dave Winer and Kyle Shank in December 2012.
Dave Winer has a long history in the tech industry. He is the founder of Living Videotext, founded in 1981, created the first personal computer outliners, ThinkTank, Ready and MORE. UserLand Software, founded in 1988, created Frontier, integrated development tools and web content management software for desktop computers. UserLand developed the first blogging software, Manila and Radio, and pioneered the development of RSS aggregator and interapplication protocols. Winer was the first blogger, and pioneered the development of podcasting, in 1994 and 2001 respectively. He has been a researcher at Harvard and NYU and has a MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, and a BA in Mathematics from Tulane University.
Kyle Shank has worked as a consultant to Silicon Valley tech companies. He has worked within the software group at IBM in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Zurich, Switzerland. In 2005 he cofounded the first open source Ruby on Rails specific IDE RadRails based on Eclipse. Kyle graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2007 with a BS in Software Engineering.
Primary customer segment: Consumer or SMB or Enterprise (pick one)
Consumer (but that barely covers it, our product is used by individuals, professionals, teachers, in all walks of live).
Number of users: please share some metrics on the size of your user base.
Very small, we're still mostly in development mode.
Logo: please send us your highest resolution logo and branding guidelines, if available.
A nice little attribute allows you to tell the renderer to make a headline in an outline collapsed by default. In the example below, the West section has the collapse att, and it's true. The others don't have it.
Download Google Reader subs before Monday
You should download your subscription list before Google Reader shuts down on Monday, even if you have already migrated to another RSS service. It's a good piece of data to have a copy of, and it's a small file -- mine is about 13K.
How to download your Google subs list
To download, click this link. It will create a file called google-reader-subscriptions.xml in your Downloads folder. That's the link that will not work after Monday.
It's like your email contact list. When you go to another service, you can give them this file so they can subscribe you to the same feeds you were subscribed to in Google Reader.
How to open in your list in Fargo
If you want, you can open in the Fargo outliner. Here's how you do it:
1. Change the file name to something short like subs.opml.
2. Copy it to Dropbox/Apps/Fargo.
3. In Fargo, choose Open in the File menu.
4. Click on subs.opml.
5. See what you have. Organize it into folders with the outliner commands.
Here's a screen shot of what my subscription list looks like.
I've finally run out of episodes of The Killing. Season 3 is the best so far. One question. Why does everyone smoke on that show, all the time? It's like one big ad for smoking.
If you're trying to express a complex thought in a tweet, you're better off writing a comment or post. Better chance of being understood.
World War Z pretty much sucked. But it was good to get away for a bit.
People often ask what I use, and I always tell them. This is it.
That's a site that's maintained by River3, which is a Dropbox-based news aggregator. I've been working on it in my spare time while we've been shipping Fargo and Trex. The reason I can do that is that it's a vast simplification of the previous river product, River2.
First, there's no UI. All input comes in through a Dropbox folder. And all output is published to the same folder.
The input is this: a set of OPML reading lists, and a template.
The output: A folder with HTML files, one with logs, and another with JSON files that can plug into other river displays if needed. (We will have this in Fargo, soon.)
The output folder is optionally mirrored on S3, so you don't have to fuss with how to make things public.
Here's a screen shot of the Dropbox folder.
The app runs in the OPML Editor, so it can run on Windows or Mac. This is not a Small Picture product, it's just a thing I've been working on, on the side.
It's pretty easy to set up, through the normal server configuration system in the OPML Editor environment. I know it's weird that an editor is also a server. But that's the way these things evolve. Servers everywhere.
I haven't made this app available to others, but if I do, it will be through the Frontier-user list. It won't be open source, but it will be free to use for whatever you like.
Keep it simple.
The + icon is your friend.
Think in outlines.
Include a picture every so often.
Dogma 2000 is incorporated by reference, even though the site is long-gone. :-(
type as you think
don’t care about your spellings, typos and cut-and-paste related mistakes
try to write correctly
do not make mistakes on purpose
no intellectual capitals or other strange letter substitutions (LiKe Th15 0r ThAt)
Share your ideas.
Use lots of smileys! (There's an infinite supply and they do not contribute to global warming, as far as we know.)
Don't worry about the table of contents page, that's mostly for you. Only your most interested readers will even go there.
I don't even have one on Scripting News.
The site has been going since 1994, can you imagine how huge that page would be?
Our goal is to port Scripting News to Fargo.
1. Tabs.
2. River.
3. Links.
4. About.
It would be nice to have a rule that numbered the items!
Why doesn't the crumb trail have a Home element as the first item?
Screen shot of my editing environment writing this post.
I am using the thread node type here.
Be prepared for change.
I got tired of fighting with Chrome and Safari over whether I'm allowed to read RSS files.
Just enter the URL in the dialog and click OK.
It even remembers the URL you can read the same file over and over.
Nice if you're trying to watch the file change.
This shit works!!
http://static.scripting.com/river3/html/fargo.html
That was a link node. It seems the RSS serializer should do something nice with it.
But lots of shit is working and for that I have to say Yippee etc.
you come collect some more in
young and old people let's get them all in
come to this house
into this house
I guess we all know why you're here.
My name is Tommy.
And I became aware this year.
If you're going to follow me.
You've got to play pinball.
So put on your eyeshades.
Plug in your ear plugs.
You know where to put the cork.
Twitter account(s):
smallpict
Facebook page(s):
We have one but there's nothing there.
Blog(s):
scripting.com