Comments on: xtimeline – Explore and Create Free Timelines

By: Nisha

Nisha — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:25:12 +0000

There is also http://whenintime.com which is HTML based rather than Flash and it allows timelines to be created using CSV files. Give it a try

By: 浏览并提交你自己的大事年代表 | 我的教育技术

浏览并提交你自己的大事年代表 | 我的教育技术 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:00:33 +0000

[...] 从网站网友的推荐上，了解到这样的方式可以做出时间列表的维基，或者对名人的作品做一个年代展示，非常形象。有相应的wordpress插件出来了：WP SIMILE Timeline，这个插件让wordpress博客的博主可以在自己的博客上建立一个类似的大事年代表来，这个插件是由SIMILE实验室开放的。用这个wordpress插件还可以写一个自己的日程表出来。相关日志-博文 [...]

By: Matin

Matin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:42:12 +0000

I know it a bit late to the supject but i will just recommend the smile widget and not any other .

By: Patrick Murray-John

Patrick Murray-John — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:10:30 +0000

One more vote for using the SIMILE widget. In the past, I’ve used SIMILE Exhibit widget with the timeline extension, which gets you basically the same thing. http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit

I’m not sure you can do this with the stand-alone timeline, but with the Exhibit you can set up a Google doc to feed in the data, which makes for a quick and easy way to collaboratively build up the data.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:34:38 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Denver.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:41:48 +0000

@cogdog I was there for sure. But I seem to recall it was ’50 ways to tell a story’ so maybe it flew right by me Good tip about importing data, thanks.

By: Denver Gingerich

Denver Gingerich — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:09:23 +0000

Please don’t use xtimeline. Use something like the SIMILE Timeline instead (the WordPress plugin was previously suggested):

http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/

The SIMILE Timeline has many advantages over xtimeline. It uses standard JavaScript and is BSD-licensed, meaning anyone can look at how it works and modify it to fit their needs. This is especially important in a classroom situation, where students may wonder how it works. In such cases you can show them the code so they can experiment with it and learn from it.

xtimeline has many qualities that make it unfit for classroom use. First of all, it uses Flash, which is not standard (see http://singpolyma.net/2009/01/beasts-of-the-standards-world/ for the definition of “standard” I use) and, as a result, many people don’t have it on their computing devices (for example iPhones do not run Flash). Furthermore, the site has very onerous usage terms: “you agree not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Service or the Software” (see http://www.xtimeline.com/z/agreement.aspx ). This makes it illegal for a student to modify the xtimeline tool or share the tool itself with a friend. This impedes their ability to learn from it.

The SIMILE Timeline accepts input in XML format, which is fairly easily to generate from CSV or other file types. Here is an example:

http://www.recovery.gov/customcode/timeline/timeline.xml

The above XML generates the timeline shown at the bottom of http://www.recovery.gov/ .

If you have any questions regarding SIMILE Timeline, let me know.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:53:16 +0000

Now I know you slept through my Northern Voice 2008 presentation, you hungover slacker.

One advantage Xtimeline has, IMHO, is that you can import the data to create the timeline from a CSV file (e.g. export from Excel) as the form entering on the sites gets tedious for a timeline with a lot of stops.

By: Scott M.

Scott M. — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:26:30 +0000

not as slick but there is a great WP plugin based on Similie as well:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-simile-timeline/

By: Tom Scheinfeldt

Tom Scheinfeldt — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:59:21 +0000

Hi Scott,

If you haven’t already, you and your students should also check out Dipity (http://www.dipity.com/) and Viygo (http://viygo.com), two other web-based timeline builders.

Tom