The current state of my investigation into using the Exhibit3 javascript library to display events on a timeline, and dynamically display their locations on a map. The version of the exhibit library that drives this prototype is "3.1.2-rc3", and I'm hosting it locally so that I can break things interestingly. For the map I'm using Google's Maps API v3. The data is from a google spreadsheet that I've made public. Google recently changed their spreadsheets api without so much as a "by your leave"; but, with some fiddling around, it still works. It's a convenient way to get data into an "exhibit", but not the only way.
This document changes a lot. It serves as a huristic tool for my autodidactic dithering. In various <script> blocks, I will redefine elements of the Exhibit and Timeline software, sprinkle them with console.log statements, and break stuff to see what will happen. If you should stumble in here and see these log statements and have any insights into what I'm dealing with, recommendations on general literature on JS, specific links to documentation, I'd love to hear about it. You can contact me here: click for address. Or, you could post your observations at the Simile-Widgets forum on Google Groups.
I have a very high opinion of the Simile project generally. Most of what I know about JavaScript, I've learned studying its code base. But, documentation has never been its long suit, and trying to figure out how specific things work has been for me a long process of trial and error.I know this document should be under version management. Eventually I'll get it in git and will provide a link here to a github repo when I do.
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I'm now using this trial balloon to test a couple of things. First, it's a testbed for getting control of the map in response to the timeline, as in the Itinerary of John Project. But also, I'm experimenting to see if I can fix the BC/AD dates problem. Notice that for dates 'before the common era,' the timeline can display -9999, but not -10000. Still not sure how to fix that:
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