
Show HN: Life – A timeline of important events in (your) life - cheeaun
https://github.com/cheeaun/life
======
kaeluka
kind of similar to my CV:
[http://stbr.me/blog/files/cv.pdf](http://stbr.me/blog/files/cv.pdf) (edit:
which I did in latex)

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Argorak
Thats neat! Is the source available somewhere?

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kaeluka
Hm, I'll try to find it and put it on github some time :) I'll update you on
that.

Thanks!

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sagz
your résumé looks real good! please do share the source if you can

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conmcg
Very nice, France just disappeared.

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baliex
Same goes for the UK

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kaeluka
old enemies ;)

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amasad
Related: I like the timelines on Bret Vector's Bio page
[http://worrydream.com/#!/Bio](http://worrydream.com/#!/Bio)

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enscr
Great design but loads slow. Wish it's as snappy as it's beautiful

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hnriot
upgrade, it was near instant for me and I have a crappy dell i5 laptop running
Ubuntu

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xutopia
I've been following Cheeaun's work for a few years now. The guy writes plugins
for various tools, always hacking away at things. It's quite entertaining to
see what he comes up with next.

~~~
mildavw
I've been using his
[http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/](http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/) to
read HN on my phone for a while (is it years yet?) now. I try others as they
appear and so far continually go back to his.

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yeukhon
1\. you have to click on the comment icon to actually read icons

2\. like most of the ios apps out there, there is no thread-level support. All
comments are on the same level.

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mildavw
1\. I don't see a problem with it. Go to the right for the details and back to
the left for the front page. Makes sense.

2\. ??? Comments threads are collapsible and indented properly.

Are you perhaps not looking at it on a phone? Try it on an iPhone, it's great.

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jongala
Looks nice. Also out there, if you didn't know, is Preceden, which I have
enjoyed using.

[http://www.preceden.com](http://www.preceden.com)

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matt1
Preceden creator here; thank you for the mention.

Fun fact: Preceden was launched on HN almost four years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114834)
:)

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contingencies
JS has some OK solutions these days (yours was probably very early), but print
and other formats can be a hassle.

For example, I spent some time looking at TeX solutions for timelines a few
years back and found there were none with support for decent multi-page
rendering, etc.

I spent a few hours over the last few days finally improving
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Buddhist_traditions_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Buddhist_traditions_timeline)
too.

Conclusion: everyone loves a good timeline. Spatial reasoning is a great way
to simplify huge collections of dates and times to filter for visual trends.
Unfortunately, there's really few good tools. There probably needs to be a
standard markup language in this space.

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bearwithclaws
Wow. This is totally cool! I like how simple your implementation is. I can see
this is not only useful as timeline of important life events, but also in
recording company milestones.

Congrates, man!

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cheeaun
Thanks :) Haven't really thought of company milestones... but I guess you're
right!

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bearwithclaws
My favorite part of your description:

    
    
      How about Facebook timeline? Meh.

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toddmorey
My quick web search didn't show anything without caveats, but if there's any
decent javascript that can be used to make the mouse wheel scroll the page
sideways, that would be a really nice addition.

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cheeaun
I thought of that too, probably using some 'mousewheel' event, but later I
realise the page height may grow as well (with vertical scrollbar) depending
on the number of events.

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markdown
I'm curious about why you chose the horizontal plane in the first place, given
that the web defaults to vertical.

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cheeaun
Well uh, that's how I visualize my life timeline in my head :) A straight
horizontal path, left to right instead of top to bottom.

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bgaluszka
Maybe bottom to top would be a better approach :)

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jcutrell
I'd love to see this as a zoomable timeline, where less important events are
less visible when zoomed out, so that the timeline itself is fully visible at
100%.

Draggable timeline in a max 100% w/h window would fix the scrolling weirdness
for folks who care, and would also be usable on a touch device, but I think
the interaction should always feel full screen, regardless of where you are in
the timeline.

Love this idea, quite a lot actually.

Perhaps this is marketable to the folks at Timehop? :)

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timeglider
Check out www.timeglider.com ---- a zooming timeline where importance is tied
to size/visibility of events. full disclosure: my creation.

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cateye
Why didn't you just use this?
[https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS](https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS)

~~~
cheeaun
I tried to use it, but it requires exact dates. Mine is obviously over-
simplified and allows flexible (rough) dates.

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rollerloller
[http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/](http://www.simile-
widgets.org/timeline/)

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rafeed
Neat, would be cool to add a link or hover over feature too for additional
info on a particular event. I'll try to work on it if I have time, but
hopefully someone else more capable is on it already!

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atsaloli
Reminds me of dandelife.
[http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dandelife](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dandelife)

This article says dandelife open sourced its software:
[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/dandelifes-
struggles-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/dandelifes-struggles-
offer-lessons-for-start-ups/?_r=0)

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chacham15
Why not flip it at the 45 degree axis to make it go vertically instead of
horizontally? That way we can scroll normally to see more.

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Raphael
If you flip it, the text would be mirrored. Rotate.

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namuol
Just once I'd like to see a site with a horizontal scroll that doesn't just
assume I'm using an Apple device.

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mergy
I've used Prezi recently for this as well.

Pic >>
[https://alpha.app.net/jmergy/post/16369534/photo/1](https://alpha.app.net/jmergy/post/16369534/photo/1)

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kfk
Nice. I would like to navigate clicking. Also, I would like to see pictures.

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Heliosmaster
Everything is just a pull request away :)

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atmosx
and some hours of code depending your level and experience :D

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jcutrell
Note - here's a quick shot at how a scrollwheel modification may work:
[http://codepen.io/jcutrell/pen/jqiDK](http://codepen.io/jcutrell/pen/jqiDK)

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dag11
But that then breaks natural horizontal scrolling if you're using a trackpad.

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jcutrell
It's certainly not meant to be a complete solution, but it can be expanded to
include both horizontal and vertical scrolling, so that either will work.

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meerita
Looks wonderful but the horizontal navigation goes out of control. I would
take Path's approach –if I have to mention something publicly known– to
display the important events of your life.

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kasperset
Another similar project [http://almende.github.io/chap-links-
library/timeline.html](http://almende.github.io/chap-links-
library/timeline.html)

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thekaleb
Now let's have a fork that uses remind[1] syntax.

[1]: [http://linux.die.net/man/1/remind](http://linux.die.net/man/1/remind)

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kuldar
What's the simplest way to run it locally? I don't necessarily want to upload
it to gh-pages, but simply opening the html won't work either.

~~~
cheeaun
Make a copy of life.example.md, rename it to life.md, edit it. Run the page on
a local server.

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filam
I didn't realize until far too recently that Python includes a built-in web
server: 1\. git clone
[https://github.com/cheeaun/life.git](https://github.com/cheeaun/life.git) 2\.
cd life 3\. python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 4\.
[http://localhost:8000/](http://localhost:8000/)

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ape4
I can't handle the day/month/year syntax

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becojo
Fork it.

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ape4
You are right I should do something rather than just complaining. Maybe
somebody (or me) could do a patch that allows YYYY-MM-DD dates with dashes. Or
YYYY-MM to specify a month.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)

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techiegirl
Looks great, I wanted to something similar, glad its here now :) But as most
are saying, the horizontal view is not very user friendly!

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baliex
That would make for a really awesome cv/resume! And what if each block could
also be a timeline of its own for more detail?

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ereckers
Some see a timeline for your life. I see potential for a visualized scheduling
app for client projects.

Nice work and implementation.

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createmyaccount
Looks great! Would be cool if you could somehow show everything in one screen.
Definitely trying it out.

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tbirdz
Something else this could be useful for is in visualization of historical
events on a common timeline.

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jspc
The DateTime syntax could be better explained: is it DDMMYYYY? Or MMDDYYYY?

~~~
Semaphor
day/month/year in the readme is pretty clear I'd say.

Though I wonder why not yyyy-mm-dd

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yogin
very nice work! I can definitely see adding links to other Life. Linking
parent, child, partner, friends, .. you can even have companies ... would
create an interesting graph of your life

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lzimm
hey that's like the weird website i made for my internets a few years ago!
[http://www.lzimm.com](http://www.lzimm.com)

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cupofjoakim
This is really nice. Definitely going to make my own.

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n1ghtmare_
Good stuff. It looks great! Will definitely use it.

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dmak
This idea is great! I love it!

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CGudapati
Very nice indeed!

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ananth99
Lovely :)

