Today Andy DeSoto helped me a lot by revealing how to get a picture to appear in my Fargo outline. As a result, I now have my picture on the About page. It's one that Paula snapped in the truck one day, as we were stopping along the way to get pictures of the birds of Chianat, Thailand. Between birds she took three seconds to snap one of me and it turned out very nice. The thing I like about it is that a stranger could look at it and imagine a huge pile of curly hair on top of my head.

Inspired by that, I then added a number of links to the Music menu, including videos of performances by Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, and others. In the Writing menu, I added a number of pieces I've written about Bob Dylan's music, including the one that was published in book form in 2011.

These links all open in the same browser tab. In the browser, one can ask for any of them to be opened in a new tab (right click and select), but I would prefer the default to be to have the links automatically open in a new tab. But I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

There's a lot more to be done, but this is good progress for now.

Ron

My next baby step with Fargo, accomplished today, was to get a preliminary About page working, largely by copying much of what dave2 did in his Fargo outline. The key was to set the attributes for the About item, as described by dave2 in his blog posting of 7/12/2013, [type = outline, name = About, flDisqusComments = false]. I was unable to get a picture embedded on the page, as dave2 was able to do. For now I just have a link to an image on dropbox and will have to look into how to get the image properly embedded on the page.

I have default listed as an item directly under #menus. This may be a mistake, as a Dave Winer comment in his blog posting (of 7/12/2013; 8:37:02 AM) suggests that this might limit me to only one menu. I want many menus in many vertical tabs, so I will need to sort out what I should be doing, instead of default.

Once I figure out how to get menus working under other vertical tabs, then I will begin filling up the outline with a lot of content, bringing together links to things I have written and posted on websites scattered all over the Internet. The hope is to be able to make this the central repository of the best content I have contributed to the Internet, which is now scattered in many places; four of my own blogs, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and others. This will be a convenience to me, giving me one place to look for content that I value the most, and perhaps there will be others who find some of this content of interest or use.

Ron

Click on the big Plus button on the left, then type text next to the page icon that comes up and that is the title, in orange. It will be date stamped after the horizontal line at the bottom of the blog posting.

Then hit enter, then tab, and type the text of the article to the right of the right pointing carat. Note that the icon on the left has changed from a page icon to the carat for these lines in the body of the text in the blog posting.

Hit enter for each new paragraph in the body of the blog posting. And it must be the Enter key on the main part of the keyboard to get a new paragraph. The Enter key on the numeric keypad doesn't give you a new paragraph. Instead it highlights that full line in black. A blank line next to the carat will produce a blank line in the output, which will produce a slightly bigger space between paragraphs, than what you get by just starting a new line of text with the next carat.

See how the space just above here is more than the space between the first three paragraphs? That's because a blank line was added in Fargo to make the space bigger. The time stamp remains the time of when the title was posted, as you add more lines to the text. And the lines will automatically wrap if you just keep typing away on the same line.

If you click on the Eye icon on the left side, you will get a view of your article in a new tab. But there is a way to make this just be a look at a draft and not a completed posting, until you click on Toggle Comment in the Outliner menu. To make it work that way, go to the Settings in the menu on the right side, and select the Insert tab. Then check the box next to the line that says "Newly inserted items are comments" and click on OK. With this configuration, you start in draft mode and clicking on Toggle Comment is like clicking on Publish, which you do only after you're totally happy with what you've written and want to send it out onto the River. At least that's how I understand Dave's posting of 7/12/2013; 9:49:32 AM.

So we now have the capability of writing and posting a blog entry. But now we need to figure out how to post static pages, like Andy DeSoto has on his Fargo outline, such as his Curriculum Vitae and other entries in the other vertical columns of his rendered outline. No such luck with that, so far.

Commentary. . . Fargo is certainly a flexible and powerful tool. I was gonna say neat and then cool, but I thought those words might make me sound too much like someone from ages past. As it stands now, I think the tool is likely to be used more successfully by those who are clever and willing to play with it to get it to produce the sort of output they want. So those with a lot of experience with techie activities, such as Andy DeSoto, are generating impressive looking results. Whereas those who are more newbies, like myself, will have to take baby steps and be satisfied with more ordinary results at first. And then there are those who can't even get those kind of results. I suppose they will go back to far less powerful tools, such as Facebook.

Ron