FAQ

FAQ

Updated Feb 4, 2010 by dfhu...@gmail.com

Introduction

These are questions that we suspect people will be curious about. Please ask additional questions at the tail end, or in the mailing list.

Details

What can I do with this code? What's its license?

BSD - an OSI-approved license. This is the same license originally used when the code was born back in the Simile project at MIT.

What is your governance model?

Committers rule.

The initial committers were seed for the development community that grew up around the original MIT project. Most of these folks have or are moving into new roles.

The community will follow a standard 'meritocracy' approach, where people earn commit rights by participating in the community and providing patches... MIT nor the future phases of the SIMILE project will not have anything to do with this process as this new project will be considered completely independent.

What is MIT's involvement?

MIT itself is a heavy user or these tools, but this project is independent. That independence does not mean that folks associated with MIT won't participate. In fact participation by such such folks is quite likely. Nothing concrete is planned for that at this stage.

Is this code repository a fork?

No. This is the main branch. In fact simile.mit.edu code repository for this project is frozen. No further commits will enter the repository for these projects. All new development from today onward will be performed on the Google Code repository.

How do I stay informed of what's happening?

Join the mailing lists!

Do I need to listen in on the simile.mit.edu lists?

Only if your interested in the code bases that continue to reside there. In fact, we would also suggest that people subscribed to SIMILE's mail lists that are only interested in these tools, unsubscribe from the simile lists and resubscribe here.

To unsubscribe, see http://simile.mit.edu/mail.html

Wait! Isn't the Javascript code being served up from simile.mit.edu?!

Yes, and that will continue. At least through 2008, and possibly longer.

MIT is going to continue hosting both http://simile.mit.edu/ and http://static.simile.mit.edu/ for a while, so there is no need to change anything if you depend on any of such file served from those URL spaces.

Comment by mr_d...@hotmail.com, Jun 23, 2008

Hi,

is there anyway to allow the timeline to change its size depending on the amount of events and automatically ajust times/months accordingly?

Comment by nick.bau...@gmail.com, Jul 2, 2008

The short answer I think is "no".

But the Kennedy assassination timeline is an example of a timeline where the scale changes at different times. To do what I think you want, you have to come up with a way to pre-process the data to find where you would need to do this (i.e. when ethers start to increase over time beyond a certain threshold) and generate the changes in the band javascript code dynamically from that. Timeline itself can't do this for you automatically I'm pretty sure.

Comment by jnlamb...@gmail.com, Jul 8, 2008

vsdfs

Comment by stevenko...@yahoo.com, Jul 14, 2008

Hi,

I'm new to this, so first let me start off by saying this is very impressive, nice work on the timeline.

I'm trying to adapt the timeline code to have a finite beginning and end date beyond which a user can't scroll. Is there anything in place already that would allow this by setting a parameter?

Thanks for your time.

Comment by hcul...@cfl.rr.com, Jul 17, 2008

Ref: Jun 23, 2008 comment by Mr D.

Nick Bauman is on the right track. For one of my projects, I am attempting to do something similar to your question. I pre-processed the data to determine the earliest date, the latest date, and a the span of time.

So my body onload looks like this:

<body onload="onLoad(beginDate,endDate,spanDays); onresize= ....

Then you need to adjust the definition of the onLoad function to allow passed arguments, such as:

function onLoad(bgnDate,endDate,spanDays) {

Then you'll need to add code to use the passed variables to get the desired effect. THis is currently where I am.

Good luck,

Comment by brian.a....@rbs.co.uk, Aug 8, 2008

Hey, loving your work........ Using Mediawiki, SemanticCalendar?, SemanticWiki? and timeline all works great. When I added the Glossary extension my timeline now identifies events as "undefined". This only happens if the event name is the same as a reference in the Glossary. Has anyone else noticed this.

Thanks.

Comment by blair.ma...@gmail.com, Sep 4, 2008

I'm having a problem with the <a href> in the xml file. Basically, it doesn't work. Any help?

Comment by project member rdq...@gmail.com, Sep 9, 2008

if you are trying to embed an <a href> in the XML data file, you can escape the html. Here's an an example (from the getting started doco...) notice how the begin and end anchor is escaped.. <a href="http .... </a>

    <event 
        start="Sep 28 2008 09:00:00 GMT"
        end="Nov 15 2008 09:00:00 GMT"
        isDuration="true"
        title="Writing Timeline documentation"
        image="http://simile.mit.edu/images/csail-logo.gif"
        >
        A few days to write some documentation for &lt;a href="http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/"&gt;Timeline&lt;/a&gt;.
    </event>

Comment by benjamin...@gmail.com, Sep 18, 2008

Did anyone ever find an answer to this:

"I'm trying to adapt the timeline code to have a finite beginning and end date beyond which a user can't scroll. Is there anything in place already that would allow this by setting a parameter?"

I'm in the same boat. I have a timeline that I only want the bottom band to display ONE DAY. There will be several events on the top band during that day, but I don't want the user to scroll to a different day.

Any ideas?

Comment by chad_gol...@hotmail.com, Oct 13, 2008

I am a teacher who would love to use this tool in the classroom. At it's present form it is too complicated for mid-level HS or Jr. High students. Is there a way, or a plan for a way for the timeline (or any section) to move away from being code based? Is a visual programming version possible? For example: Being able to click on the dinosaur2 example and add a new dinosaur from a popup box instead of programming. So students can focus on entering their data as opposed to struggling with the code? I've worked with HTML in the past, but it's been a while. I know students with zero experience with it would have great difficulty.

Comment by sc...@cabin-john.net, Nov 5, 2008

Is there a tarz or zip file of the entire distro for use on a private net? The svn links on the "download" tab don't get timeline as far as I can tell. I've used some variations, but I don't want to abuse the servers with potentially harmful paths, so I'll just ask.

Thanks!

Comment by wanderin...@gmail.com, Nov 30, 2008

One critical detail is missing: WHERE DO YOU DOWNLOAD THE CODE?

I see links for downloading the thesis, and links for getting the bleeding-edge version from SVN, but where is the usual "Download the latest stable version" link?

Still haven't found it, guess I'll keep hunting.

Comment by seanco...@gmail.com, Nov 30, 2008

to sc...@cabin-john.net, wanderingstan and others who are looking for "Download the latest stable version" link ....

I am not yet finished but this is what I have found: 1. This link told me to first download/install SVN Commandline client. http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Timeline/Download_The_Source

2. So, I went ahead and downloaded rapidsvn from this link: http://www.rapidsvn.org/index.php?title=OnlineHelp:Contents#Windows This installation on my Windows XP was straight-forward and actually gave me a windows interface (instead of command-line).

3. The simile-widgets link in 1) also indicated that the repository of the stable 1.2 version is at: http://simile.mit.edu/repository/timeline/tags/1.2/

4. Using the help tab of rapidsvn installed client, I checked out the parent directory to my local machine in c:\temp directory.

5. Now the fun begins :-)

Let me know guys, if this helped you at all... Thanks

Comment by tomko...@gmail.com, Dec 4, 2008

I am a teacher who would love to use this tool in the classroom. I live on Hungary on the other hand the project is not top notch in Hungarian. My question the successor: What is it necessary to portray in order for me not to have a problem with the accentuated letters? With respect and thanks Koósz Tamás

Comment by emadjum...@gmail.com, Mar 16, 2009

Hello, I am using exhibit 2.0 at my website http://sort.shareck.com/ar in both languages English and Arabic, How can I change the language for the below items to my (Arabic Language)? - (Reset All Filters) - grouped as sorted - sorted by - then by... - filtered from .... originally

and if there any other thing need to change ? Thanks and Regards

Comment by aragorn1...@gmail.com, Jul 9, 2009

hello, I am currently using this wonderful tool. I would be interested to know if this sort of filter could be applied. suppose I have a list of authors on the facet with label "Authors", and I would like to only display names of certain authors, can I do this without having to write additional information in the .json file (something like filterAuthor=["author1", "author2"],

thank you.

Comment by litobyte...@gmail.com, Jul 10, 2009

to aragorn168b:

Yes, there is, try the Ajax filtering example: http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/examples/jfk/jfk.html

to tomkoosz: have you tried the utf-8 encoding for your pages ? I could have italian accentuated letters in the Bubble / Event description in this way.

Comment by jayesh.g...@gmail.com, Aug 12, 2009

the code is downloadable, and it also provides a run(.bat) script which sets-up a server. can we then use the local version of scripts? or is it required that we call scripts from simile.mit.edu always? how i configure this?

-jayesh

Comment by canthony...@gmail.com, Oct 10, 2009

I would like to adapt this for use as a sample timeline for degree completion. The problem is it would not use a Gregorian style time span. The bottom band would have times such as "Year 1", "Year 2", etc...and the top band would show semester names ("Fall", "Spring", "Summer"). Is this possible? If so, how?

Thank you. And excellent product by the way.

Tony

Comment by rik...@hotmail.fr, Nov 25, 2009

Hello,

I would like to use a checkbox in exhibit like that : <input type="checkbox" name="options[]" value=".label">

But the value .label is not recognized. Can I do that ? And how ? Thanks a lot

Riky'

Comment by dru...@gmail.com, Mar 31, 2010

Hi,

Is there a way to use the timeline for future unknown dates...a good example of this would be for someone looking to create a timeline of biblical eschatology (end times) where the dates, etc are totally unknown but the events could be listed in a linear fashion?

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