

Six Types of Timelines You Can Make with Preceden - matt1
http://www.preceden.com/examples

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matt1
Preceden, a startup I launched on HackerNews about a month ago, has been doing
fairly well. One of the common requests was an _Examples_ page, so I put this
together. It shows a few different types of timelines you can make using
Preceden.

If you have any ideas on how to make it more compelling or additional examples
you can think of, the feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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dantheman
Matt were you at barcamp boston a year or two ago talking about this idea?

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matt1
Negative. Preceden is about four months old from the first line of code to now
(I started on the flight back from Startup School).

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timmorgan
This is cool. Hadn't heard of it before (so thanks for the post).

Though, the common problem I've seen with interactive timelines like this is
that the text get selected when I move it back and forth. I wanted to use the
SIMILE Timeline widget awhile back for a corporate project, and found that IE
(any version) had the text-select problem, which was problematic for the
"enterprise" standard browser.

Now I'm even experiencing it in Firefox. Seems like we've (the web dev
community) been fighting with text selection problems for years and still
haven't found a good solution to turn it off when dragging? Bummer.

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TeHCrAzY
Also should note that on IE ver8.0.6001 each of the timelines are very, very
laggy (core 2 duo, 5gb ram).

~~~
matt1
I checked it out and see what you mean. I'll look into it -- thanks.

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Timothee
I really like this idea. Creating a life timeline is something that I have
thought about doing in the past couple of years when I realized that I
couldn't always remember when such or such event happened. (e.g. "did we move
in 96 or 97? It was definitely after Junior High but…")

However, I have to admit that for my personal use I'm not sure I would want to
use it, just because I don't like the idea of putting a personal timeline in a
service that might not be around in a few years, let alone in a couple of
decades.

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matt1
FYSA: There's a "Print" option on the timelines that let you print a list of
the events.

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Timothee
Thanks!

Note that I didn't mean to be negative about your product. I'm sure your goal
isn't to lock information down without a way to get to it. It's more that from
the examples the one that resonated the most with me was the life timeline,
and I feel that's the kind of information that I would want to last "forever"
and that I might be more inclined to implement myself for that reason. (a
simple version of it)

Ideally, I would even love a timeline gathering all kind of information. Some
kind of ultimate mashup of timelines, with pictures, movies, events, people…
that link to Picasa/Flickr, Facebook, Gmail… But that's besides the scope of
Preceden :)

~~~
matt1
For now...

~~~
Timothee
Nice tease :)

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ojilles
Why do I need to create an account to create a timeline? Wouldn't it be much
better to let me dabble around and if I want to protect my timeline from
anyone else, I create an account?

~~~
matt1
It's not just a matter of protection -- how do you work on it a day or two
from now?

One way to do it would be to generate a long, random URL that you can use to
get to and dedit your timeline. Anyone who has that URL can contribute to that
timeline, regardless of whether they have an account. Would that work for you?

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simonw
How about this: allow me to play with the tool without logging in or creating
an account. If I do create something, set a cookie and show me a big nagging
message at the top of every page on the site from then on saying "you have
unsaved work - you can view it here, but you should create an account to save
it permanently".

~~~
kyro
I get a feeling if he did that, people here would say something along the
lines of 'why are you nagging me to save my work - just let me play with your
service and decide to create an account on my own.'

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matt1
Yeah. Plus, creating an account takes like 20 seconds and eventually there
will be OpenID support too.

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bjelkeman-again
Seems it is pretty popular at the moment:

    
    
      Heroku | Backlog too deep
      The application currently has too many requests in its backlog.

~~~
matt1
Yeah, sorry about that.

It's the first time the site's gotten enough traffic to cause any issues, plus
the examples page is pretty resource intensive. It's time to work on some
optimization.

Edit: Since this is using Heroku, I just cranked up the Dynos. Heroku is truly
amazing.

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dangoldin
Do you have a way to automatically create some of these through XML or
something else? It may be a nice way to automatically generate these.

~~~
matt1
One of the next major iterations will include an API, which a few folks have
asked for.

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cubicle67
Cool. I like the momentum when scrolling left/right

~~~
matt1
Implementing it made me appreciate high school physics:

[http://id.mind.net/~zona/mstm/physics/mechanics/kinematics/E...](http://id.mind.net/~zona/mstm/physics/mechanics/kinematics/EquationsForAcceleratedMotion/EquationsForAcceleratedMotion.htm)

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grinich
Very Dustin Curtis.

<http://dustincurtis.com/about.html>

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quizbiz
I'm not sure of that injects a sense of urgency or just useless speculation.

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exit
i think the point is just to attract attention.

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dchs
Very nice! Never underestimate how hard it is to make something complicated
appear simple.

