In 2013 when we were getting our browser-based outliner ready, Les Orchard, a longtime reader of this blog, and contributor to our community (he wrote the initial S3 glue for Frontier, a huge gift), suggested we look at using Dropbox as our storage system.

I was already a serious Dropbox user, and loved how it virtualized my file system. Using Dropbox meant I could go anywhere, with a laptop, and have access to my full work environment. This was part of the dream of using networks since I started using them in the 70s. Dropbox was a big piece of the puzzle.

But Les had shown me how Dropbox could be even more.

Fargo, my Dropbox-based writing environment

We hooked our outliner up to their file system, and shipped it. That's Fargo.

I'm using Fargo to write this. Scripting News, my blog, is a Fargo site.

Later, I put a content management system in Fargo, so you could now publish a website without any extra server software. It still amazes me that this experiment worked.

Now I read articles that Dropbox is facing increased competition from Microsoft and Google. They need something extra, something different from the Office suites both companies offer. Imho it should be of the web, using the most modern approach to development, the single-page JavaScript app.

Developers, developers, developers

I think independent developers have the key to giving them a competitive edge.

There's a universe of possible one-page apps and a vast sea of developer creativity to tap into. They just have to help create the market, a little more than they already have.