It’s been a while since I posted anything about The Time When so I thought I’d write a quick update about what’s newish over there.
- The Timeline is my favourite new thing and it’s a much more useful way to view all the memories on the site.
If there’s time I’d like to add some more “newsy” events to provide a bit of context but it’s good even without them.(UPDATE: I’ve now added some news events to the timeline.) Each user also has their own personal timeline of their memories, such as this one.
These are all created using the Simile Timeline code which is a truly lovely piece of work. It’s surprisingly simple to create complex and useful timelines that really give a better handle on an awful lot of data.
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All memories can now be tagged. We’ve experimented with creating two sets of tags; each memory can have separate lists of “keywords” and “location” tags. We thought it might be useful to separate the location data out of the general tag soup. Many users have trouble understanding how to enter tags, despite some help text, but that’s only to be expected unfortunately. If you’re looking for them, there’s a cloud of popular tags on the front page sidebar.
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Logged-in users can now “favourite” memories. This is a bit more like del.icio.us links rather than Flickr-style favourites: when you mark a memory as a favourite you can add a brief comment about it. This has just gone live so I’m not sure in what way people will use it yet.
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