Import Your Fargo Outlines Into LO2
by Ron Chester ★ Saturday, April 22, 2017

In August 2016 Dave Winer announced that near the end of June 2017, Dropbox will be disabling a feature that Fargo requires to work and this will mean the end of Fargo outlines. No worries, he had already designed and built LO2, which can work with the same Fargo outlines. They just need to be imported into LO2.  I have tried this and it works! 

Here is the procedure I followed to get my Fargo outlines into LO2. I will preface this by saying that I started using Dropbox at a time when it came with a Public folder. It is my understanding that newer Dropbox accounts might not have such a folder. In that case, the user would have to discover how to get the public URL for a file in Dropbox. 

Here is My Procedure

Open four tabs in the (Chrome in my case) browser, as follows.

(1) Little Onliner 2 (LO2) where you want your outlines to be.

(2) Dropbox at Dropbox -----> Apps -----> Fargo which is where the Fargo opml files are stored.

(3) Another Dropbox tab, pointing to Dropbox -----> Public.

(4) Fargo at fargo.io which contains your Fargo outlines.

Here We Go 

Go to tab (4) and find an outline you'd like to get into LO2 and make a note of its title at the top of Fargo. e.g. Planning Activities. Jump over to tab (2) and find the opml for that outline, which will be a file with that title ending in opml. e.g. PlanningActivities.opml. If there are several, be sure to pick the most recent one. On the line for that file, click on the square box around the three dots and in the choices that pop up, click on Copy. Dropbox will want to know where to place the copy, so navigate to the public folder at Dropbox -----> Public and click on the Copy button.

Now switch to tab (3) and find the opml file you just copied into that folder. On the far right for that file, click on the square box around the three dots and in the choices that pop up, click on Copy public link, which will open a new Dropbox window with that public URL. Click on the Copy to Clipboard button.

Now you're all set for being able to import that outline file into LO2. Jump to tab (1). At the top of LO2, click on File -----> New. Enter the Title you want for this outline in LO2. It doesn't have to be the same title that was used for it in Fargo. After you enter the title you want, click on the Okay button. A blank outline will appear.

Now the Payoff 

At the top of LO2, select File -----> Import OPML. Paste in the public URL you got from Dropbox, which is in your clipboard, and click on the OK button. There may be some delay while the file loads and then Boom, the outline appears.

Look it over. Once you are satisfied it is correct, you could switch back to tab (4) and delete the outline from there [optional]. Just select the outline from the choices at the top of Fargo and pick the one you just copied to LO2. Go to the very top node of that outline, select it and hit delete on your keyboard and poof, it and everything below it will be gone.  Or go to tab (2) and just delete the opml files there. Or just wait until 6/28/17 and Fargo will stop working anyway.