Today I’m launching the Historical Timeline Creator. It’s a web application that lets you enter historical information and produces clean timeline visualizations.

The app takes text like this:

Title: Internet Milestones
ARPANET first operational, 1969
Early network research, 1960-1975
First email sent, 1971
TCP/IP standardized, 1983
DNS introduced, 1984-1987
World Wide Web invented, 1989
First website published, 1991
Commercial internet boom, 1995-2001
Google founded, 1998
Social media emergence, 2004-2010

And turns that into a timeline like this:

Launch early

The app is lightweight, and I aim to keep it that way. History is largely conveyed with words. With the app, you type words in a text box and you get a visual that helps put those words in the perspective of time.

That said, I’ve felt the temptation to keep adding this or that, keep tweaking, before putting it out there. I’ve been a part of teams launching such feature rich version 1.0’s for so long that the limited functionality I’ve made so far feels almost laughable.

But I want to know if what I’m building is useful for anyone. So it’s time to just get it out there.

Launch often

I have more ideas for features to add, and I aim to ship updates going forward. Here are a couple of things I’m thinking about.

First, there are different ways to visualize timelines. I have one style, but I’d like to explore adding more. The existing style could also be enhanced with callouts or emphasis for certain events.

Second, AI is everywhere these days. Often it feels forced, but I think there’s a non-gimmicky feature where AI gets integrated via a large language model (LLM) to help create timelines. The text driven nature of the app fits nicely with LLMs¹, and I even wonder if there’s more of a future where text driven user inputs will be more commonplace (for use by humans and machines).

Profit?

Despite being a professional software developer for years, this is the first time I’ve made software that’s available to the public where someone can pay me directly if they get value from what I’ve made.

There’s a functional version that’s free to use on the home page, but if you want to make more involved timelines, you need to pay. Currently for a one-time payment you can get lifetime access to what I’m calling the standard version of the app.

Will anyone pay for it? I have no idea. But if nothing else, it helped me to build some knowledge around how to integrate payments into a software project.

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That’s all for now. I’ll keep building, and hope to write future posts sharing some of what I’ve learned in my reintroduction to web development and launching my own product. If you have feedback, please share it with me: [email protected].

Footnotes

1. The text in the example timeline on this page actually came from an LLM. So take the dates with a grain of salt. ↩