Making timelines with Time Glider
Posted: February 24, 2010 Filed under: Great tools, Self-promotion | Tags: Spokane, Time Glider, timlines, YMCA 7 Comments »
Last week a reporter working on a story about the past and future of Spokane’s downtown YMCA building wandered over to my desk. He wanted to do an online timeline to accompany it. I said sure. (Short attention span? Check out my new Showroom page to see the finished product.)
I had planned to use Dipity, which I’ve heard good things about. But when I created an account, I didn’t see how to manually build a timeline. At least with the free account. I saw a lot of auto-update ability tied into other media accounts (YouTube, Flickr, RSS feeds). But I wanted to add bullets as far back as 1890. I didn’t have a Google account back then.
The reporter had learned about Time Glider while at a Knight Digital Media Center multimedia seminar, so I decided to try it. Check out the result, then let’s go to the bullet points.
Pros
- Simple, web-based interface that’s easy to learn.
- Embeddable
- Highly customizable: You can upload photos directly or link to images on your own server. You can change the icon with each point. You can assign relative significance to each point on the timeline.
- Linking out: Give your readers a taste and link to the full story
- Free!
Cons
- Requires Flash support.
- Clunky on the user end. You can adjust your view from the month to the century level (or anything in between). But scrolling and jumping between items didn’t feel instantly right.
- No thumbnails. Photo support is great, but you have to scale your images to 200px or below to avoid clutter. It would be great to be able to expand a thumbnail on the timeline to a bigger image.
In hindsight, I might use this again, but only if working with a time span tighter than 130 years. I’d much prefer to roll my own — after I learn django and improve my CSS skills.
This looks like something one could have fun with for someone who’s retiring, a couple’s anniversary, etc. But from the cons you list it would require a more savvy user.
That’s a good thought, Hank. I think this tool would work better for topics that stretch for a shorter period of time, say 25 to 35 years.
We used in Dipity in St. Louis. I went through some informal instruction on it, but I never used it to create something. You should be able to manually build a timeline on there, though I don’t recall how to start. (That was also at least a year ago, so it might have changed.) I also think it has the expanding thumbnail capability you mentioned.
I would refer you to my web-fun guru Erica Smith for more specifics.
Thanks, Sara. I had a hunch if I posted this somebody would let me know that there is a way to manually tweak Dipity. Halfway there. That said, here’s an important distinction, in my book: I didn’t figure out Dipity right away, but I picked up Time Glider instantly. I had a day to do this project, so time was definitely a factor.
Hi Andrew,
Sorry you had a hard time trying to setup a timeline manually with Dipity. Here’s a link to a YouTube tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8slBz1dtgXM
Dipity is AJAX based and also address some of the ‘cons’ you pointed out above. Good luck with your timeline what ever solution you use!
Thanks, Derek. I definitely wasn’t ruling Dipity out for the future. On my to-do list is going back and playing with it. That tutorial will be a boon. Also, great job representing your project. This isn’t exactly a Technorati top-rated blog
Hey there Andrew: Thanks for the nice blog entry about TimeGlider. I think your critique is a good one. We’re working on having the zooming be a little more responsive and doing some serious head-scratching about how to handle a lot of (stacking) images. We’re experimenting with a corner-resize function, but then the system would ideally resize them larger as things spread out, eh? Any more thoughts you have are most welcome. Also, check out our new New York Times Explorer tool: timeglider.com/nytimes. (You’ll notice snappier zoom working with this.)
Cheers,
Michael Richardson
Cofounder/Lead Developer
TimeGlider.com