How I created my first timeline (and cursed only a couple times)

See my timeline here: https://bit.ly/32EELcr

I tackled creating a timeline for the first time as my techie project.

Previously, I (or students) would have simply used InDesign to create it, making each little piece along the way — and having to tweak and tweak and tweak to make the spacing right. On the website, it would have simply been a PDF of what was in print, too.

Enter TimelineJS.

Some of my goals and parameters:

• Use some photos that I had taken and some found online.
• Complete a decent timeline in a reasonable amount of time, which for this would have been two hours, not counting taking the photos.
• Learn it well enough that I would be able to reasonably assess the potential time involved and level of frustration a student might find while tackling this.

Some lessons learned:

• If you have taken your own photos, you need to add several steps to the process. Photo files need to have a URL that ends in jpg, gif, png or jpeg. You aren’t actually dropping an image file into the spreadsheet, just the URL.
  • This means you need to upload your photos to something that will give you such a URL. I chose doing this through Flickr. I’m not sure what else might work. Having your photos in a Google folder won’t work because each image file address does not end in one of those four options.
• If you are getting photos from the internet, you can see the potential problems already with attribution. (For this piece, I added credits to the first two, but the NPR one is obviously not correct.)
• For photos from the internet, you need to get the URL for the photo itself, not the page that it is on. And even then, a couple photos with files that ended in jpg didn’t show up in the final graphic. This was when I cursed.
• I probably would not use this in my non-journalism classes and just have them create a physical timeline on posterboard. That would be faster and accomplish the same educational goals. There’s a lot of time spent figuring out how to create the timeline, which is fine when one or two students are trying to pull something together for the website, but in a class of 25 trying to learn it, you could easily waste several class days just getting them up to speed on the tech side of it.