This is the third launch of Military Timelines and I’m hoping soon I’ll start getting it right! As always the focus is on the timelines and more importantly the horizontal timelines. Timelines should be horizontal they just don’t work vertically. But timeline rotation aside the key to Military Timelines (www.MilitaryTimelines.com) is to try and make sense of historical battles and warfare not just with respect to the battles themselves but in terms of the wider picture and being able to see what else was going on at the time.
This covers things such as the Battle of the Somme and it’s devastating casualties but which needs to be explained in relation to the Battle of Verdun which took place at the same time. In fact one of the aims of the Somme was to divert German troops away from Verdun.
Also it covers things like the Hundred Years War which, when you see the Battles listed looks like a constant conflict but gives a different picture when you see it on a timeline. Here you can pick out all the often long periods of relative peace punctuated by the wars.
The first version was a plain html site which I hosted from a Dropbox account. The timelines themselves were built using the similie widgets which I’m still using for most of the site even though they’re now unsupported. Because the first site was just html and because my styling skills have never been great the look and feel of the early version wasn’t great.
It was also very hard to create new posts so the site was static for a long, long time. That was why I moved it to Blogger.
Unfortunately I moved it to Blogger just as the rest of the world was moving to WordPress. I did manage to get a little bit of styling for it and a logo but it was still very clunky and hard to update.
So, after putting it off for way to long I decided to move it to WordPress. It’s still largely based on the Similie Widgets although I did experiment with several others. TimeLineJS is pretty good but it has a limit on the number of entries and tends to end up producing things that are more like slideshows than timelines. So I’ve stuck with what I’ve got in the knowledge that I may need to move off them at some point but I can probably fix most things with them until then.
So, there you are the new MilitaryTimelines.com site. I’m hoping to add more interesting timelines in the future and if you’d like to suggest any please get in touch at hamish@militarytimelines.com.