I read an interesting piece by Brent Simmons yesterday about his passion for creating blogging systems. He's thinking about doing a quick one, running in node.js. As I read the piece I recognized a lot of the ideas as ones that we've already implemented in Fargo Publisher, which is an open source, MIT licensed, node.js app. #
My first thought was wouldn't it be great if Brent used Fargo Publisher as a starting point? That way we might get some new features, maybe some bug fixes, and more users. Having two pieces of software resting on top of an API gives it a much better chance to gain traction.#
My second thought was that he was planning on using the Metaweblog API, something I designed in 2002, to build on the Blogger API. But we've gone so much further in the intervening 12 years. Metaweblog views each post as a document, but Fargo views a whole website as a document. Suppose you had a computer that could only deal with one file at a time, and one came along that could have as many open windows as you want? Wouldn't you want to at least try it?#
In that way Fargo 2 is the next step after Metaweblog. Yes, it's too bad progress happens so slowly in tech. 12 years for such a simple evolution. But at least it happened. It would be a shame if we had to wait another 12 years for adoption by users, esp very advanced ones like my longtime buddy, Brent. #