Histropedia Development Update

Histropedia BETA v1.0!!

The big news this month is the launch of our first official public beta version. There is still a long way to go till we get a product that is ready for the mass market, but for anyone with a little patience we now have a real look at what the end vision will look like. The latest release gives a complete re-design from the prototype, with a simplified searching system and new reading window giving a view into the related content for each event. The other major change to go into the beta version is the user editing feature. This is what will let people add events that are missing from the database and events with incorrect dates; we also included a picture select feature to allow the best picture from the Wikipedia article to be selected. There have been countless other little fixes along the way and the website is looking a lot more polished. Looking forward, we will be introducing 2 or 3 major features before we go back and polish off the rough edges across the whole site. The next features we have planned (not in this order) are:

1. Custom Event Creation: This feature will open the number of events that can be created on the site. Currently we can only create one event for each Wikipedia article; this means if there is no article we cannot create the event. With Custom Event Creation this will no longer be a problem allowing new event with alternate titles and date ranges to be linked to Wikipedia articles or sections of articles.
2. Event Priority Display: This feature will make browsing large timelines much easier. When the timeline get overcrowded less important event will disappear, only re-appearing as you zoom closer into the period of time you are interested in. This will allow you to zoom to show a huge period of time and only see the most relevant events on the timeline.
3. Zooming into Months and Days: This will make the timelines much more detailed and increase the number of timeline we can make. Currently all event are pinned to the year they occurred, once pinned to days and months we would be able to zoom into much narrow periods of time.

Check out the site from here www.histropedia.com and let us know what your choice for the next feature would be. Sorry for the boring layout, no pictures today ....it’s been a busy week! I will be publishing a development update blog once month. I will also be publishing a featured timelines blog and a Tips n Tricks blog for making the most out of Histropedia, each will be published once a month with a general review to round off the month. So there will be a new post once a week, but each topic will only repeat once a month.   I'm also thinking about a newsletter, but you'll have to sign-up to the site to get that :)