TimelineJS moving from Verite.co to the Knight Lab

[Joe Germuska]

TimelineJS community:

From the beginning, TimelineJS was a project of the Northwestern University Knight Lab. However, when Zach Wise first set out to create it, the Knight Lab had a less developed software process and identity, so Zach presented Timeline as a product of his personal Verite.co website. Since then, two things have happened: TimelineJS has become wildly popular, and the Knight Lab has brought in a new executive director and a new director of software engineering (that's me, although I kind of prefer the title "chief nerd"). 

In the next few weeks, TimelineJS will be "moving" to a new home on the internet. It should have little impact on your existing timelines, but I wanted to make this small announcement so that you might be less surprised. The official home for the project is now http://timeline.KnightLab.com. In the near future, we'll start automatically redirecting people from http://timeline.verite.co to the new site. Things should work pretty much the same as ever.

If you've been accustomed to dealing with the project source code or filing issues on GitHub, that will also move, to https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS. I know that Git has some support for automatically redirecting repositories if you already have code checked out, but I don't have a good way to test how this will happen before we make the switch. Hopefully it will be minimally inconvenient for people, and of course, we will help how we can.

If you are able to visit the new http://timeline.KnightLab.com site and generate new 'embed' code, that would be great. We would like to eventually phase out the http://embed.verite.com server which people have been using, although we don't have a specific timeline for that right now. And while TimelineJS isn't under active development, future bug fixes, new languages, etc will be added to the new site and the new embed system, while the old one will not be updated.

Finally, we are planning on closing down this Google group, which still retains the "Verite" name. Rather than switch to a new Google Group, we are going to experiment with ZenDesk's customer service and forum product. This is active now, although we haven't had much opportunity to put it through its paces yet. The new forum will be at https://knightlab.zendesk.com/

The closing of this Google group will come sometime after we make the other changes mentioned above, so if you wish to continue to use it for a while, that will be fine. There will be more announcements. Again, I hope that none of these changes are too disruptive.

Best

Joe

PS Zach is hard at work on a map-based variant on Timeline that we're calling StoryMap. It will be considerably trickier to make it easy for people to make their own story maps, but we hope to have a beta version ready for people who are comfortable creating the JSON data sometime in October.

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Joe Germuska • joege...@northwestern.edu • @JoeGermuska
Chief Nerd, Knight Lab • http://KnightLab.Northwestern.edu • @KnightLab