Six Types of Timelines You Can Make with Preceden | Hacker News Reader

Six Types of Timelines You Can Make with Preceden

preceden.com

27 pointsmatt129 comments

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.

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

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

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.

Actually, this does solve it for the most part (or so I thought).

Whenever you release the mouse, an invisible text box will be selected via some JavaScript, which deselects any text that was selected while dragging it. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.

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

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

Could this be intentional? There might be a legitimate reason to select/copy/paste the text here.

RE: Firefox text selection -- there is a browser-specific CSS rule that controls for that: -moz-user-select

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-user-select

Of course, this has no effect in other browsers, like Opera which I'm using right now.

In the past, I've been able to circumvent this problem by overlaying any text with a 1x1 transparent gif which captures the click before it can hit the text. Not sure what web devs use to deal with this problem these days.

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.

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

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 :)

For now...

Nice tease :)

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?

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?

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".

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.'

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

Yes, exactly. If I'm okay with the privacy that that gives (e.g. I don't give anyone the URL) I don't even need an account, until I get serious about it. That'be awesome :-)

Seems it is pretty popular at the moment:

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

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.

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.

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

Cool. I like the momentum when scrolling left/right

Implementing it made me appreciate high school physics:

http://id.mind.net/~zona/mstm/physics/mechanics/kinematics/E...

Very Dustin Curtis.

http://dustincurtis.com/about.html

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

i think the point is just to attract attention.

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

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