It’s time for a project reflection! I think I’ve made pretty good progress on the project even though there’s always a nagging voice in my head telling me I’ve not done enough.
So far I’ve gotten all the provided data for the timeline off of EventViewpoint and into spreadsheets. Also very recently with the help of Tierney, I figured out how to have a TimelineJS iframe access a CSS in the domain files which I’m very proud of and really opened so many possibilities.
The immediate next steps are finding a way to format the data nicely and inputing all the data I have. This means understanding the TimelineJS CSS and editing it to match the XCTF site and formatted well for the data provided. I’m holding off on data input because of normalisation and copyright stuff I’ll need to ask my project lead directly about. More long term, I should be making sure the process and data formatting is well documented because there will be more data added in the future by other people.
Another thing that is far in the back of my mind is the second half of the project. It will stay on the back burner until the timeline is done or on hold for whatever reason. It’s an alumni contact tab for the site that can allow alumni to submit their cross country stories. I’m thinking possibly collecting their email and have some person vetting them as a real alumni or maybe have someone corresponding with them via email to see what they’d like to share.
The main obstacle that I encountered so far was working around the idiosyncrasies of TimelineJS. The main issue is the generated link preview being janky and google sheets being finicky especially when TimelineJS needed to process many colours and options. I think I’ve found a way forward using TimelineJS’s hidden features and CSS so that’s good. I don’t have any long lingering questions at the moment but I know for sure there will be hundreds of little questions that pop up when I’m learning to edit the TimelineJS CSS more in depth. I’ll just have to resolve them as they come.