Breakfast with Rex
My friend Rex Hammock from Nashville was in town this weekend and we went for a couple of bike rides. It's all good. Last summer I visited Rex and his wife Ann in their home town, and we did bike rides there too.
Rex is a publisher. He does magazines and turns them into blogs. He's parked in an interesting place and has been for quite a few years. He's smart, but keeps it simple. And he reads my blog, and I his.
A couple of pieces caught his attention last week. One about scripting in Fargo, and the other about ignoring what you don't understand. Rex has a funny sense of humor so I can't always tell when he's serious. But he says in a self-deprecating way that there's a lot of stuff he doesn't understand, but he asks questions, and I usually try to answer them when I can.
So he wanted to know about scripting in Fargo this morning. I tabled the discussion because I was enjoying Brooklyn Diner corned beef hash with poached eggs. We went on to other topics, and I realized later that I forgot to answer his question! Ouch.
Better late than never. Here's the deal on scripting in Fargo.
1. It means you can customize the app. Probably not a big deal for Rex, because he's not an every-day user of Fargo. But for people who are, the ability to add just the command you've been wanting, without waiting for the developer to add it, could turn out to be important.
2. You can build systems with editors that work on the net, are hooked into a CMS, and understand structure, as outliners inherently do. It's funny because in all the writing I've done about scripting in Fargo, I've missed this one. Building systems means having a way for an administrative person add to a database that is incorporated into your web presence, without content management in their way. We were on the cusp of it with Frontier, but for some reason we never encouraged people to look at the product that way. I guess by that point we weren't focused on scripting anymore.
It occurred to me that given what Rex does, #2 might actually turn out to be important.