Apologies for the silence - progress over the last few weeks

Hi All

Just to say I have been a working on the timeline a bit more and thinking about the interlinear. I have a question about the timeline:

What's the best way of displaying things? It's difficult, because if you do a passage lookup, you might be interested in a view of decades, or days, depending on how many events happen to be on that period.

There is also the wider of issue of how many timelines/timebands to display. For eg. do we really need to show everything at a particular date. Is it something the user should choose completely, or would it be something that we'd try and guess and then give options for more or less detail... For eg., lookup Ex 2:1 on http://crosswire.org:8080/~chrisburrell/Step.html and you'll see we're showing a lots of things, which the user might not be interested in...

At the moment, my thoughts have been to associate a scale to each of the timeline/importance columns, and when looking up a passage, to take the event referring to the smallest portion of scripture, working out it's timeline/importance and looking up the suggested scale. Thne sending that to the client to ensure it is displayed at a good scale... So for eg. Ex 2:1 would be on a week/day scale, whereas the wilderness would possibly be on a year/decade scale. And then judges would be on decade, etc... This means we'll have to tweak things a bit as we realise that the scale i've chosen is perhaps not ideal.

Anyhow, I've been putting in place a database framework to ensure things can be done quicker in the future, as well as a config framework to ensure we can run on both single user and web/server environments.

As far as the wiki dictionary goes, could we put all your work in the subversion repository? under the step-dataloader/data project? I already have (an outdated version) of the timeline base data. What this project does is load up from files into the java db that we have.

Chris