Timeglider Closure FAQs

When did Timeglider shut down?

Timeglider shut down on November 30, 2020. Its NYT Explorer, a companion tool that built timelines out of New York Times articles, is no longer online either.

What happened to my subscription?

We canceled all active paying subscriptions on September 15th.

What happens to my timelines?

You have a few options:

1. If you no longer need your timelines, there's nothing to do
2. Email [email protected] to request an export of your data
3. Import that data into Preceden to keep working on your timeline

See below for more details.

What's the difference between Timeglider and Preceden?

Here are some things that Preceden can do that Timeglider could not:

• Preceden lets you export your timeline as an image or PDF, making it easy to print and share
• Preceden supports dragging and dropping events to reposition them and change their dates
• Preceden provides many different themes and ways to customize your timeline's appearance
• Preceden lets you add layers to help you organize events
• Preceden supports many different types of date and time formats

Here are some things that Timeglider could do that Preceden cannot:

• Timeglider let you specify the importance of an event, which controlled how large it appeared
• Timeglider let you add tags to your timeline to categorize it
• Timeglider supported having a single event belong to multiple timelines
• Timeglider let you filter your timeline to only look at events that met certain criteria

How do I import the CSV into Preceden?

Before you can import a CSV file, you'll need to sign up for Preceden and upgrade to a paid plan. Spreadsheet importing is a paid feature, and the free plan separately caps each timeline at 10 events.

After that, open an empty timeline in Preceden and click Share, then Spreadsheet. Expand the Spreadsheet Import section, click Import a Spreadsheet, and follow the instructions to import your CSV:

A few notes on importing:

• Preceden darkens the colors so they read better on the default white background, but you can change the event colors after the import.
• By default Preceden places one event per row, which can make the timeline quite long if you have a lot of events. To tighten it up, open Appearance, click Layers, and check Automatically compress layers.
• Preceden doesn't support all of the same features as Timeglider, importance among them, so your timeline will not look exactly the same as it did in Timeglider.
• Images do not come across in the CSV, so you'll need to re-add them to the events in Preceden after the import.
• Preceden caps each timeline at 1,500 events, and timelines get noticeably slow to work with after 400-500. If your Timeglider timeline is larger than that, split the CSV up and import it into several smaller timelines. The "Spreadsheet Wrangling" section of Splitting Up a Large Timeline shows one way to do it.
• Free accounts can create unlimited timelines with up to 10 events each, which covers most Timeglider users. To import a timeline with 11 or more events you'll need a paid plan.

What are some other timeline makers besides Preceden?

There are many other timeline makers if you don't want to switch to Preceden, but none of them can import your Timeglider data automatically, so you would have to recreate your timelines by hand.

Does the closure impact embedded timelines?

If you were using Timeglider's embed features, those embeds stopped working when we shut the site down.

Have additional questions?

Shoot us an email at [email protected].