Technologies This Site Uses

Timelines as a force for good…..

A few years back, Northwestern University (Knight Lab) made an interactive timeline ‘widget’: timeline.knightlab.com (TimelineJS3). That’s open source on GitHub. Key contributors: Joe Germuska, Zach Wise, Heather Billings, Jennifer Y Wilson, and Scott Bradley.

More recently, University of Idaho’s the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) use that technology in a “static site generator” way of working via Jekyll, and a timeline template for that: github.com/thecdil/timelinejs-template with a few timeline entries (video, sound, text, pics). See their fantastic preview site: thecdil.github.io/timelinejs-template. Key contributor: Evan Williamson

This site, its-airborne.org, has five interactive timelines to make our case for world recognition of this fact for COVID-19 and the rollout of airborne precautions after that. See them in the top☝️nav☝️of☝️THIS☝️page️. Here’s one as a pic with some explanation in red;

You should use these technologies for your own cause

You should work with that CDIL-made template above

Use the template to make your mini site
Pick a domain name for it.
Host it on Github (or similar).
Learn Markdown (Jekyll uses that) and JSON (for the events in the timeline widget)
Push “events” into your timeline as fast as you like - the site redeploys for each “commit” you have pushed.
Encourage contributors via GitHub’s “Pull Requests” workflow (review and comment before publication)
Also encourage contributors via GitHub’s “issues” features (not as smooth as pull requests, but still a tool for conversation before publication)

Science: History-retaining merkle trees (such as Git) with static site generation (like Jekyll) and nice interactive widgets (like TimelineJS3) are a wave of the future - the revolution will be merkleized

If you dislike the the “Jekyll” & “Git” techs

You can also deploy the timelines using TimelineJS3 by using GoogleDocs to hold the timeline. See timeline.knightlab.com/#make
There’s a Wordpress plugin for the same TimelineJS3 + GoogleDocs way of working.

Link to vaccine development timeline (2020 - 2021) here: a TODO for another team

Link to EU / AstraZeneca dispute (Q1 2021) timeline here: a TODO for another team