Dave has announced that Fargo will stop functioning in June 2017 because Dropbox will stop supporting the API that it uses to talk with Dropbox.  I've been using Fargo since its beginning (has it really been 4 years?) so I am sad to see it go, but honestly not surprised. It is a reminder of just how fragile the Internet is becoming because so much of it is built upon something someone else owns.

Imagine what will happen to the Internet if Jeff Bezos where to leave Amazon and the new leadership decided AWS was not core to their business. Amazon owns the hardware that hosts a good chunk of the Internet, and it would be their right to shut down that hardware almost at any time. Now, Amazon charges to use their hardware, so that provides some friction to it being shut down, but a lot of the Internet is built on free stuff for which there is little friction for its disappearance.

But, I digress... 

1999 replaces the blogging functionality that the Fargo Publisher provides, and I've been doing my most recent writing in it, and Little Outliner replaces the outlining functionality that Fargo provides, so there is space and time for which to move.

As a user of Fargo, there are a few functions it provides me that are currently not provided by either 1999 or Little Outliner that I hope might be provided in some way in the future. Grouped in the two application areas, they are:

Fargo to 1999

• A linkblogging bookmarklet to quickly start a new blog post with a hyperlink to a source web page.

Fargo to Little Outliner

• An Add Feed option (in Fargo, Outliner, Add Feed) for managing RSS subscription lists
• The ability to encrypt outlines and read outlines encrypted in Fargo

With Fargo it is real easy to add a new entry to a RSS subscription list, you just create a new node, write the name of the feed, click Outliner, Add Feed, paste in the URL to the feed, click OK and you are done. To do this with Little Outliner today requires adding/editing attributes that may not be familiar to the average end user. It might be that this can be duplicated by writing a script and selecting File, Run Selection but that requires learning some Javascript and figuring out how to manipulate attributes of a node in an outline. Perhaps adding Plugins to Little Outliner is the way to go? 

Finally, there are a couple of things Fargo provides that I like but are not in 1999, and I could live without but want to mention. One is the #stream type that organizes blog posts around dates. To me, journal-like writing such as linkblogging is best organized by date, where I can easily find what I wrote on a given date. The journal-like writing has been how I have been using Fargo, and in fact it is how I learned to blog using EditThisPage. 

1999, while publishing content in reverse chronological order, uses Titles as the primary organizing method, as does almost all other blogging tools. For example, compare this link that provides a days worth of short posts created in Fargo with this link to a story (blog post) I created in 1999. Finding all that I wrote on a specific day with Fargo is very easy, finding all that I wrote on a specific day with 1999 takes more work.  

I think what I would like is something like the monthly archive feature in 1999, which shows a month's worth of posts on one page, available for each day. It may be, however, that I am the only person who finds such a feature useful or likes to look back on what I wrote on a given day, and so I don't expect this to appear in 1999 but it is something that I will miss.

I will also miss the backgroundImage attribute that makes it real easy to put a background image on a blog post. For a while I was selecting an image for each day that I thought summarized the posts for the day. 

Finally, I will miss the ability to use an outliner for writing blog posts. For me, while an input box is good for a two or three paragraph post, I prefer writing and editing longer stories in an outliner. Maybe some day Concord will appear as an editor option in 1999?