What is NimbleText (a story about cheese)

A good friend asked me the other day, "Wait a second, what's nimble text?" and I stammered out an answer. I'm not good at elevator pitches. Waving my arms around didn't make it any clearer. I tried waving them in bigger circles and pointing as I talked. It still didn't help.

I decided to email him an answer. It turns out I don't have his email address, so I'm writing it here, and I'll transmit the URL some other way. You get to read my reply in public.

What then, is NimbleText?

NimbleText is an adhoc code generator.

For example, say you have a list of "keywords", (he's a digital advertising specialist... it takes all kinds) and you want to do something with each keyword, maybe insert it into a database.

Here's your list of keywords (these are French cheeses)

Abondance
Banon
Beaufort
Bleu
Brie
Brillat-Savarin
Brocciu Cara or Brocciu
Cabécou
Cancoillotte
Camembert de Normandie
Chabichou du Poitou
Chaource
Chevrotin
Comté

...you paste that into NimbleText, and type in a pattern... how about this:

Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('$0')

NimbleText will *magically* create this SQL query for you:

Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Abondance')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Banon')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Beaufort')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Bleu')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Brie')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Brillat-Savarin')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Brocciu Cara or Brocciu')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Cabécou')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Cancoillotte')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Camembert de Normandie')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Chabichou du Poitou')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Chaource')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Chevrotin')
Insert into Keywords(Keyword) Values ('Comté')

Two seconds later, you run the SQL and insert all the keywords into the database.

You can play with that example here: https://nimbletext.com/Live/398054487/

If the input had more than one column, you would refer to the next column as $1, then $2, etc.

So if the keyword data included, I don't know... some search traffic numbers?...

Abondance,1000
Banon,3000
Beaufort,200
Bleu,12
Brie,6
Brillat-Savarin,90

We could use a pattern like this:

Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('$0', $1)

To generate this result:

Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Abondance', 1000)
Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Banon', 3000)
Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Beaufort', 200)
Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Bleu', 12)
Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Brie', 6)
Insert into KeywordResult (Keyword,Result) Values ('Brillat-Savarin', 90)

(See this example here: https://nimbletext.com/Live/284342338/)

But it's not just for generating SQL queries, it's for text in general; and it's not just for keywords and it's not even specific to cheeses. There are many non-cheese uses.

It helps you anytime you want to rearrange some data and do something to every row, to generate a result.

There's an online version, and a downloadable version (with extra features). You can embed javascript inside your patterns to do really tricky formatting stuff. It's versatile.

It's just this thing, you know. For stuff.

My book "Choose Your First Product" is available now.

It gives you 4 easy steps to find and validate a humble product idea.

Learn more.