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This application – free-timeline.com – is specifically designed to create and display "timelines." There are some FDL-related example timelines visible after you log in with password firedoglake and password firepups (all lower case). If this is your first use of free-timeline.com, please read the rest of this intro – thanks. Timelines are different "beasts" than calendars – as you'll soon see...
This free-timeline.com web-app is perhaps the least "mature" of all that are on offer, but its strengths outweigh its weaknesses, imho.
It works fine with FireFox on the Mac, but not with Safari on the Mac. If you haven't upgraded to FireFox yet on your Mac, please do; for me at least, the results when I display a timeline on Safari are undefined.
Once you arrive at free-timeline.com, locate the Bigger button and click it to taste (I like to go to the max). You'll have to follow its gyrations as the display enlarges; it's a frisky li'l bugger. Your chosen width holds for the duration of a session, no longer, I think. (At least, I haven't been able to figure out a way to store a "preferred width" with a timeline of mine.) You'll have to use the horizontal scrollbar to display it all, of course.
At the moment, in order for you to view my "sample timelines," I must put them at risk. I've made several functionality and UI suggestions to the proprietors of free-timeline.com and several of them are "in the pipeline," but for the moment there's no distinction between Viewers (read access only) and Editors (full read/write access). You also can't share timelines with others and/or make copies of them from one user to another, or even within a single user.
So – as it is, whatever you see, you can destroy. So if you're leaving the "firedoglake" account and it asks whether or not you want to save any changes you might have made, PLEASE SAY NO. There's no user-accessible way for me to "back up" what's in my account in a way that I might recover from mistakes, either...
There is nothing whatever to stop you from creating your own private account/password on this server. In fact, imho, if you want to learn how this app works, then imho you really should! :) There's a useful test timeline you get when you start up a new account. When you play around with it for awhile, you'll get the hang of how to write your own timelines... If you find this interesting, I strongly encourage you to do your own, perhaps relevant to 'PupLand. Maybe you'll share them with us by posting the account/password covering your access to free-timeline.com?
To access "my" timelines, as I said above, you click on the LOG IN button and give the user account firedoglake with password firepups (all lower case). This gets you into the account where I built some timelines – but gives you 'WAY too much power, hence my humble request not to break anything by saving any changes you might make while viewing these two timelines.
The first object you will encounter is the thing I first created while learning the app. It's called FDL's test timeline 1 (dates estimated) :) — and its contents are just for fun.
When a free-timeline covers the present day, that day is shown by a vertical gray line running through the display.
I got serious on my second object – and I had help from the best. Click the LOAD/MANAGE button on the NavBar and select Marcy's Comey timeline of 02May07 to LOAD. Once you do that, the display will show you all the info from Marcy's linked post, but transferred into the free-timeline app. [I did it by extracting the code from Marcy's original post and moving it, line-by-line, into timeline events. I made some "canonical" changes to precede each event with its date, as well as providing the dates or date ranges for each event Marcy presented. [If an event is a single-day affair, you can leave the "End Date" blank and the app "does the right thing" with the date marker. There are occasional bugs, but given the utility of the app, I think they're tolerable.]
I'm working on transcribing a recent ThinkProgress timeline into this app. You'll also be able to see (but pls not touch) that object. Tnx! :)- Important: under FireFox on the Mac (at least), this application does NOT work if AdBlock is on for this site.
Any issues with how free-timeline works on your browser, on your hardware, under your operating system? Please report in the comments section, below.
You can see that free-timeline accepts HTML in event labels. I put Marcy's source HTML info in relatively unchanged, except that to emphasize the hyperlinks in each one, I *CAPITALIZED* each link and surrounded it with asterisks. (As Nathan Hale once famously said, "I regret I have but 1 * for my Country.")
You can print out whatever you see on your free-timeline display.
You can change the font size in your timelines to increase their legibility, which of course will mean more horizontal scrolling; this may cause certain long labels to be truncated on the right. I use a long-time-offset null event to try to ensure this doesn't happen.
What I said above bears repeating, imho: Whatever you see in free-timeline, you can easily destroy. So when you leave the timelines in the firedoglake account and it asks whether or not you want to save any changes you might have made, PLEASE SAY NO.
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