When I initially ran across the Simile Timeline project, I was pretty impressed, both by the power and flexibility of the framework and also by how well it works. What’s more, it’s really simple to use and the site has a good tutorial for creating your own timeline.

After seeing the example timeline of the JFK assassination, I was inspired to create a timeline of my own. My first thought was to create a timeline displaying wars that the US has been in - mostly because I was really curious about how that would look: war-time vs. peace-time, etc. However, for a couple years now, that project never really got off the ground (mostly out of general laziness on my part) … until now.

To show it off, we’ve also created a playground at play.refactr.com, so that we have a sandbox to try out new frameworks or ideas - and share our experiences along the way.

I used data taken from the wikipedia entry US Wars to create the timeline. Right now, I have two separate timelines using the same data. The first timeline is just a straight-forward representation of the data. The second timeline uses the same data, but utilizes the framework’s zooming ability to warp specific periods of time. In this second case, I chose to compress the boring peaceful non-war years of US history, so we can scroll right to the interesting parts of the timeline.

The data that I’ve captured from the various wikipedia entries is pretty sparse - it’s by no means exhaustive or even representative. I just tried to grab a couple major highlights of each war to show off the timeline framework and more should obviously be added. I’m also working up another example, so stay tuned for more timeline goodness.