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This useful article on Timeline from my favorite author Gina Trapani of Lifehacker.com, very useful article, hope all of you find this very useful. Here what Gina Trapani says about timline…..

I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to when things happened. Significant life events - like graduating and 9/11 - are all landmarks that help me remember when events occurred relative to them (i.e., "that was before I moved to California.") But there are still long periods of my past that are just a big amorphous blur - especially before I started using a computer every day.

As a result, I’ve always been fascinated with digital timelines as a memory aid and reference: the ones that occur as artifacts of other activities (like our sent email folder and digital photo collection), and the ones we can purposefully construct for historical documentation.

So today I’ll go over how to visualize a series of events using the open source dynamic widget called Timeline.

Why Timeline?

There are tons of ways to create a timeline - from a text file to an Excel spreadsheet to a weblog to a hosted webapp. While Timeline is more difficult to use than those other options, I chose it for a few reasons:

* It separates data from presentation. Timeline’s event data is stored in an XML document that the view loads and renders. Unlike a spreadsheet or regular web page, the data is in an independent format that could very easily be used to create any number of different timeline formats.

* It lives on your computer. I want to keep my timelines around for a long time, publish them on my own web site, or simply keep them for my eyes only. Unlike a hosted web app, with Timeline you create and control your own data locally.

* It’s highly customizable. The open source Timeline offers a lot of neat options for rendering your timeline, from zooming in on particular days on an hour-by-hour basis, embedding images and links, and displaying events down to the minute, or simply for a number of days.

* It’s super good-looking. See for yourself how you can pan and zoom in on events on a Simile Timeline, on this sample Lifehacker timeline I put together in an hour or so last night:

You’ll notice that it works a lot like Google Maps. Click and drag it to move forward and back in time, and click on an event dot to view its detail bubble.

Pretty cool, huh? You can have one too.

Make your own Timeline

Timeline requires that you create and edit a raw XML file, something folks who haven’t at least mucked around with HTML might find insanely confusing, or at least just insane. If you’re not down with the X and ML, Timeline’s not for you. If you are, let’s dive in.

A Timeline widget consists of two files: the XML data file, and the HTML widget file.

1. Create your events.xml file. Make a new text file and save it as events.xml. Its format is pretty simple. To give you an idea, here’s the events.xml file that created the timeline above. Here’s a snippet of what it looks like:

<data>
    <event
        start="Jan 31 2005 00:00:00 GMT"
        title="Lifehacker.com launches"
        image="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/www.lifehacker.com/img/girl-face.png">
        After several boring weeks of "blogging in the dark," Lifehacker.com opens to the public.
     </event>
</data>

<data>
    <event
        start="Jan 31 2005 00:00:00 GMT"
        title="Lifehacker.com launches"
        image="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/www.lifehacker.com/img/girl-face.png">
        After several boring weeks of "blogging in the dark," Lifehacker.com opens to the public.
     </event>
</data>

There you can see the event is defined with a start date, title, image, and description. Pan to January 31, 2005 on the Timeline above to see how this snippet looks in the Timeline widget.

Now, I like XML, but editing this document by hand got old really quick. So I threw together a Quick and Dirty Event XML-O-Matic web page, that makes it easier to enter event details and get its snippet of xml to add to your data file. Here’s what that looks like:

Use the Event XML-O-Matic to build your event file.

Your events.xml file should start with the <data> tag, then include your copied and pasted event data bits. Finally, close it with the </data> tag. Again, check out this working events.xml file as a model.

2. Set up the HTML widget file. Timeline’s presentation is highly-customizable, but all its options go beyond the scope of this article. To get you started with a plain Jane timeline as shown above, download this timeline.html file into the same directory where your events.xml file lives.

Then, open the timeline.html file with your web browser. Voila! The events you defined in your data file will render on your timeline. Be sure to head on over to the Timeline web site for more great timeline examples and documentation on how to customize your timeline.

The possibilities for historical personal documentation are endless with a timeline. Map your life story on a personal timeline or your resume on a career timeline. Visualize your family history, or your kid’s progression from a teensy little infant to an angsty teen. Chart your travels or goal progress on a timeline, too.

—————————— Thanks Gina  ————————————-

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We take immense pleasure in wishing you all very happy Diwali, the festival of lights.

DIWALI this year could see more light than sound as manufacturers have churned out more of what they call fancy fireworks and aerial shots. The trend has emerged over the last two-three years as people have increasingly moved away from noisy crackers and opted for colorful and bright varieties.

Over the last two years they have added more than 250 varieties and thanks to their Chinese collaborators the range is growing continuously.

This year manufacturers appear to have focused more on `light than sound’. This means parents will have to shell out more for fireworks as fancier items are costlier.

Cost is not a major factor to most because it is once a year purchase; the increase when compared to that of other commodities is not much. More importantly, kids drive sales - a family will buy a particular quantity of fireworks depending on the number of kids, and will pick quantity irrespective of cost.

Business for the dealers continues to increase but the duration of sales has come down. People buy fireworks just days ahead of the festival now. A few years back fireworks purchase was in two batches - one lot for the days before the Diwali and a major purchase for the festival itself.

Manufacturers have cut back on producing noisy varieties mostly because of consumer preference. Standard Fireworks has introduced over 40 new varieties this year

Diwali, also called Deepavali (Hindi: ???, Tamil: ???????) is a major Hindu festival. Known as the “Festival of Lights,” it symbolises the victory of good over evil, and lamps are lit as a sign of celebration and hope for mankind. The festival of Diwali or Deepavali (literal meaning: lines of lamps) is rooted in the mythological epic Ramayana, and is a celebration of the return of Lord Ram after killing Ravan the Demon during his exile for 14 years. The day of killing Ravan is celebrated as Dussehra (19 to 21 days before Diwali). Celebrations focus on lights and lamps, particularly traditional diyas (as illustrated). Fireworks are associated with the festival in many regions of India.

Diwali is celebrated for five consecutive days in the Hindu month of Ashwayuja. It usually occurs in October/November, and is one of the most popular and eagerly awaited festivals of India. Hindus, Jains and Sikhs alike regard it as a celebration of life and use the occasion to strengthen family and social relationships. For Jains it is one of the most important festivals, and beginning of the Jain year. Jains celebrate Diwali because Lord Mahaveera has gone to Moksha. It is also a significant festival for the Sikh faith.

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Windows only: Freeware program Webaroo lets you download online content to your local computer, allowing you to access the content offline.

At first blush, Webaroo may remind you of previously-mentioned tools Slogger or Scrapbook, but it’s actually a lot different. With Webaroo, you can choose to download a local copy of any web site, however many link levels deep you choose; but what’s more unique about Webaroo are the web packs, which offer, for example, the ability to download and search the entirety of Wikipedia offline. After you’ve downloaded a web pack or web page, you can set Webaroo to update them automatically when you are online so things are always up-to-date.

If you rarely find yourself without internet access, the 10GB of space required by the Wikipedia pack may not be worth it, but if you spend a lot of time traveling or otherwise away from the internet, access to Wikipedia or any of the other pre-defined web packs or user-defined web sites could be invaluable.

Webaroo

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Windows only: Freeware (er… donationware) program FreeRAM XP Pro monitors your computer’s RAM, freeing up RAM as appropriate to optimize your performance.

I’ve never used any RAM-optimization software before, but after giving FreeRAM XP Pro a try for a bit this morning, it seems like a pretty good little app. If you’re worried that you’ve been bumping up against the limits of what you can sqeeze out of your RAM when you fire up a memory-intensive app, it might be worth it to try out FreeRAM XP Pro before upgrading. Anyone out there ever used this program or another RAM optimizing app?

FreeRAM XP Pro

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Not to be outdone by Microsoft’s recent release of Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla will release the second major version of its rival Firefox browser on Tuesday, October 24.

According to Mozilla Vice President of Products Christopher Beard, Firefox 2.0, which should be available on Tuesday if all goes according to schedule, includes key new usability features missing in the new IE 7.

Updated Mozilla Features

Mozilla has also enhanced the popular tabbed browsing feature in 2.0 that Firefox introduced when it emerged two years ago as the first significant rival to IE in years, Beard adds. Tabs allow users to navigate more easily between multiple Web pages when browsing the Internet, and Microsoft added tabs to IE 7 after Firefox’s success with the feature.

In Firefox 2.0, Mozilla has added a "close" button on its tabs, as well as new visual features to make the tabs appear more obvious to the user, Beard says.

New usability features in Firefox 2.0 that differentiate it from IE 7 include one that will restore the browser to pages where the user was working if a sudden OS restart is required. "If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those Web pages and content is pretty disruptive," Beard notes.

Firefox 2.0 is offering two options for enabling this feature. One way is that, by default, the browser will give the user an option to restore his or her browser sessions if there is an unexpected shutdown; the other is an advanced option to set the browser so that it always restores the last five pages visited before a sudden reboot.

Antiphishing Filters in Both Browsers

Like IE 7, Firefox 2.0 also has an Antiphishing filter that will help protect users from divulging personal information to fraudulent Web sites. But Mozilla has taken a different approach to its antiphishing filter than Microsoft has, Beard says.

Instead of checking individual Web pages users visit against lists of known phishing sites, thus sending information from the site to third parties that keep lists of such sites, Firefox updates its blacklist of known fraudulent Web sites automatically every half-hour to an hour. Beard said this better protects users’ privacy because no information from the sites they’ve visited is sent to any third parties.

Mozilla also has added spell-checking features to the browser similar to those found in word-processing applications. Whenever a user is typing text in the browser–as when typing the name of a Web site, a blog entry, or an e-mail–Firefox’s spell checker will underline in red words that appear misspelled. Right-clicking on the word will give a user options for a corrected spelling.

In addition, Firefox 2.0 has a new feature in its integrated search box that will suggest a list of search terms after a user types a few letters of a word, depending on the search engine being used. Firefox 2.0 uses Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com search engines as options for the search box, and each uses a different algorithm to suggest search terms, Beard explains. To ensure that this feature is not disruptive to the user experience, the suggested search terms will appear in a separate pane below the search box, he adds.

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