After working with Simile timelines for over a year, I believe we have come up with a useful tool to expand the use of the timeline to a much wider audience.
Website: http://wikitimelines.net We now have a website widget that allows any web developer to place a timeline into any website. Examples are below. This technology is obviously very complex. The back-end database script comprises 11,324 lines of code, as of today. There are only a handful of people working on this project, mostly nites and weekends (I have been on this full-time for many months). We would like to add some more manpower to this effort (mostly javascript debugging/ideas) and add people to the team to potentially benefit if and when this tool becomes profitable. We were thinking of letting websites utilize the timeline on any website for $9.95 a year, if we can achieve wide-spread adoption. The architecture is basically a database system that pumps out javascript from a server into a client browser. The list of technologies involved include the following: 1) HTML 2) JavaScript 3) jQuery 4) Foxpro (because of it's speed) 5) Paragraph disambiguation (or boiler-plating, depending on who you talk to) 6) Sentence disambiguation 7) Cloud based computing (Amazon Web Services or AWS) 8) Very complex date parsing and conversion 9) Cryptographic hash utilization 10) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 11) AJAX As of this writing, this widget runs on every major browser with good yet mixed results. Originally designed as an add on for Wikipedia.org, over time it naturally evolved into a generalized tool that can be used by a nearly universal audience. A partial list of potential uses (besides a really cool add-on for Facebook) including: 1) Family histories and genealogy 2) Legal (indictments and trial exhibits) 3) Medical (patient histories and clinical trials) 4) History (teaching and study) 5) Project planning 6) Obituaries 7) Event planning 8) Numerous, currently unknown, applications What we are looking for: 1) Help testing 2) We need javascript help, in real time to form a more effective team 3) Ideas and suggestions 4) Moral support, lol 5) Possible venture capital 6) Website design 7) Graphics help 8) We dont need any help with the back-end database, as we have that under control. For example, today I am confronted with the following 4 unresolved issues: 1) The widget works fine when the initial javascript is called via an IP address (184.72.244.64) but fails when called by domain name (http://wikitimelines.net/). This is not acceptable because it makes the application server specific (cant swap out servers for scaling). 2) We have incorporated a picture band which we know how to uniformly size pictures in. The problem is we have no idea how to obtain the picture files date (date of the file on a remote server), to intelligently place the picture on the timeline. We can get the height and width of the picture via javascript, but not its date. I believe this can be done via PHP, but we are apprehensive about adding another layer of technology. 3) We would like to make it so you can pass an external URL to the timeline widget, so, you could, for example, place a timeline of a Wikipedia article on any website, as in: <script src="http://184.72.244.64/load1.js?url1=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln"; type="text/javascript"></script> We just cant figure out why we cant make this work. 4) The javascript engine takes 2 passes at the server to create a timeline. We need to re-factor this to make 1 pass, which will greatly increase the widgets speed. We need help to engineer this. You have permission to forward or post this message anywhere. And we hope you do. Thank you for your time and we hope you have found this to be interesting. Here is our testing: http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis4.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis5.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis6.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis7.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis8.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis9.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis10.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis11.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis12.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis13.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis14.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis15.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis16.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis17.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis18.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis19.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis20.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis21.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis22.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis23.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis24.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis25.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis26.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis27.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis28.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis29.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis30.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis31.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis32.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis33.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis34.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis35.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis36.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis37.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis38.htm http://www.freewebs.com/instawares/atestscriptdeletethis39.htm Thanks Jeff Roehl [email protected] (818) 912-7530 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en.
