08-04-2018, 01:16 PM
Here ya go...
LINK
This page is the result of me playing around with this last night and this evening. Some of these have filter capability turned on, some don't. Some have colors, some don't. I can adjust them in a variety of ways and the changes will show up by refreshing the page where the embed code lives.
I suspect we will need to play with this a bit to determine all the things it can and can't do and possible design tricks to optimize functionality.
In terms of a Master Timeline - I think that is a worthwhile thing in its own right, even if we were to never display any part of it on the website itself. This simply because it would provide a single 'source of truth' and let us rapidly see the huge OA timeline in more than one dimension. The rough mockup I've done touches that a little, but I suspect we could do more.
An obvious limit with the embedded timelines is screen width - although Trond might be able to help us with that. Alternatively, we might use a Master Timeline to keep track of all of our history and then use separate labeled tabs on the same workbook for each timeline on the site. These sub-timelines could be built by copy pasting content from the Master and then embedding into the website. This would allow them to be fairly stable in themselves (They wouldn't reflect the changes every time we were updating or manipulating the Master for some other project) but would also be in one place and clearly labeled so we could make updates to specific timelines or across all of them much more rapidly than we do now where we have to remember what Timelines we have and where we put them (with very mixed results so far).
We could also eliminate some types of timeline. For example, the Technology Timeline could likely be folded into the Master. People wanting to see the history of technology across the setting could just filter on that Type (or whatever we end up calling it).
Timelines for planets might need to be separate from the Master so as not to reflect every change we might make while doing other things (or not, depending on what we can do design wise). But they could probably be kept on a dedicated Timeline spreadsheet or workbook with each planet labled and easy to find and update from the central location.
Anyway, please look them over, ask questions, and share ideas.
Thanks!
Todd
LINK
This page is the result of me playing around with this last night and this evening. Some of these have filter capability turned on, some don't. Some have colors, some don't. I can adjust them in a variety of ways and the changes will show up by refreshing the page where the embed code lives.
I suspect we will need to play with this a bit to determine all the things it can and can't do and possible design tricks to optimize functionality.
In terms of a Master Timeline - I think that is a worthwhile thing in its own right, even if we were to never display any part of it on the website itself. This simply because it would provide a single 'source of truth' and let us rapidly see the huge OA timeline in more than one dimension. The rough mockup I've done touches that a little, but I suspect we could do more.
An obvious limit with the embedded timelines is screen width - although Trond might be able to help us with that. Alternatively, we might use a Master Timeline to keep track of all of our history and then use separate labeled tabs on the same workbook for each timeline on the site. These sub-timelines could be built by copy pasting content from the Master and then embedding into the website. This would allow them to be fairly stable in themselves (They wouldn't reflect the changes every time we were updating or manipulating the Master for some other project) but would also be in one place and clearly labeled so we could make updates to specific timelines or across all of them much more rapidly than we do now where we have to remember what Timelines we have and where we put them (with very mixed results so far).
We could also eliminate some types of timeline. For example, the Technology Timeline could likely be folded into the Master. People wanting to see the history of technology across the setting could just filter on that Type (or whatever we end up calling it).
Timelines for planets might need to be separate from the Master so as not to reflect every change we might make while doing other things (or not, depending on what we can do design wise). But they could probably be kept on a dedicated Timeline spreadsheet or workbook with each planet labled and easy to find and update from the central location.
Anyway, please look them over, ask questions, and share ideas.
Thanks!
Todd