In the last weeks I completely changed the design of this site. It became much lighter and I removed some plugins which I didn’t want to use anymore. In particular, I removed the simile timeline on the left.
In the previous design, I used the WP Simile Timeline plugin to show the timeline of the blog entries. This was a vertical timeline located in the left sidebar. The problem was that vertical timelines are pretty complicated to design and the simile timeline doesn’t really support a vertical layout. Therefore I chose to change to a horizontal blog timeline as part of the redesign. At the same time I realized that the timeline doesn’t fit to the overall design.
Hence I wrote my own timeline implementation using jQuery and embedded it in the new layout. Each small vertical tick in the header corresponds to a blog entry. If you hover over it, the link to the blog entry is shown.
Currently there are only few features:
- RSS feed: the timeline implementation reads the RSS feed of the site an creates the div elements for the timeline.
- Custom creation of events: create a div and call a simple javascript method to add an event.
- Design completely using CSS: it is very difficult to change the theme of the simile timeline. The timeline above can be adjusted using very simple CSS.
But of course, it still can (and needs) to be enhanced.
. But apart of that, I don’t think it’s fit for purpose. Hypergraph, like other tools that show trees/graphs using hyperbolic geometry, is strong when there is some exponentially growing graph structure in the background. For example the organisational structure of a company or a class hierarchy are suitable.