My friend Anton Zuiker is our best tester. Anton is a really smart guy. And he's earnest. And doesn't give up. And he makes things break. Which is exactly what you look for in a tester. Because you want to find out about breakage as soon as you break something. Easier to fix then. And it helps make the software better sooner, which is what we're trying to do, all software developers.

I'm on a train and couldn't think of a better place to answer his question than in a blog post, so here goes.

Headlines in outlines, sometimes called nodes, can have hidden attributes that tell software how to do special things with it. One of the things we can do is include an outline in another. Include is the right word.

The way you do that is to add a type attribute to the node. The value of the type attribute should be "include" -- leave out the quotes. It should have another attribute called "url" and its value is the address of the outline that's to be included. That's all there is to it.

Now, how to do that?

In Fargo, we have a command that lets you edit the attributes of any headline. It's called, unimaginatively, Edit Attributes, and it's in the outliner menu. So if I wanted to add an include node here, pointing to my states outline, I would edit its attributes like this:

The "created" attribute is automatically put there by Fargo, on every headline you create, so we can tell when it was created. It also gives each headline a unique identity, unless you manage to create two headlines in the same second (us programmer types are always thinking about things this way, they're called "edge" conditions, and every one of them eventually happens, it seems).

I'm sure this is confusing at first. But if you try it out, ask questions, and do it again, eventually it'll make sense. You're learning a pretty cool computer science concept -- pointers. But it's really not that hard, once you understand it. ;-)