Google Adwords, Small Things amuse..

June 23, 2009, 12:59 am

Thanks to Google and their Stimulus Offer I have seventy bucks of adwords to spend. I am not sure why, but I got a kick out of seeing my ad in sponsored search results. It is probably just a combination of 1am and codeine for back pain.

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Timeline Project Community - Open BETA

June 21, 2009, 8:12 pm

If you are interested in contributing chronological/geographical data to either:

You can now sign up for an account and start entering data.

I still have a list of features that I would like to implement and the project is still very much in BETA. I would appreciate any suggestions or corrections you might have. You can email me at .

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Create Timeline Data Point

June 1, 2009, 1:33 pm

I have been making some good progress on my Timeline Project Community mode work. The thumbnailed image is a screenshot of the data point creation web form (click it for a detailed screenshot). I have tried to streamline the data creation process as much as possible. I see the data entry process as follows:

  • Select the project. Currently this is just World War Two and the Napoleonic Wars.
  • Enter a short title.
  • Find an appropriate article on WikiPedia which describes the data point in question. Alternatively the user can just select default which will use an appropriate root page.
  • Select a start date and, optionally, an end date for the event in question.
  • Type a brief description of the event (more detail can be found in the WikiPedia link).
  • Determine if the event can be described with a single location, a line (for fronts and borders etc) or a shaded region.
  • Based on the previous type, either type in coordinates or draw on the Google Map.
  • Select appropriate Tags for the data point. Tags are just identifiers to qualifier and sort data points. The primary tag decides what sort of icon to put on the map (land combat, naval combat etc). The other tags supply more information about the vent. One or more country tags describe which nations were involved in the event.

So that is basically it, hopefully pretty straightforward, with the real effort being the research to create a data point in the first place.

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Timeline Project Community

May 11, 2009, 8:31 pm

I haven't entered any new data points outside the original early war European data points. The time taken to enter the data and the wealth of historical knowledge on the Internet, has motivated me to implement a community mode for the site. When I have finished I hope there will be users willing to contribute accurate World War Two chronological and geographical data. I am in the process of adding the following features:

  • User logins
  • Ability to add and edit data points for the Timemap
  • Ability to comment on data points
  • Ability to flag data points as accurate/inaccurate.
  • User badge system to acknowledge contributions

Once I have the core framework implemented I hope to extend the site to other periods of history.

If you are interested in being involved in the BETA for this project, please send me an email at .

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World War Two Timeline Project

April 10, 2009, 1:31 am

I have got my new Google Timemap based mashup project to a version 0.9ish level of functionality:

World War Two Timeline Project

I still have a lot of data to enter, but the framework is there and is an adequate proof of concept.

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