Been a while.

I know, it's been a while. I started off all gung-ho with the site and it quickly grew beyond my ability and free time to maintain everything. When I built the timeline, I was hoping that a flood of people would help me populate it with all the details. Unfortunately, only a very few number of people ever submitted anything (though the spammers have had fun trying to get things on the timeline). Nearly all of what is on the timeline was added by myself. Until I can find some more free time, the timeline will have to wait.

Good news is that there are a ton of things to be put on the timeline: The fact that after Ron Paul ended his campaigning his news coverage seems to have increased a bit. And then there's the march on Washington that wasn't even covered by the main stream media. Not to mention the launch of the Campaign for Liberty and related items.

I would definitely appreciate any help you can give. I may not be able to approve the submissions right away, but I'd rather have a bunch of approvals to make rather than submissions :) Thanks in advance.

Jump To Date Feature

It's gotten increasingly more time consuming to scroll to particular dates, so I've added a quick and simple little javascript based "jump to date" feature.

You can select a year, a month and year, or a specific date to jump to. Jumping to a year will bring you to the end of the selected year (because the timeline is currently displayed newest first). Same with selecting a month and year. Picking a specific date will obviously show you all of the events for that date.

Note that the date selector doesn't filter out events like the event type and search filters do, but I may change this behavior in the future.

While making this change, I also fixed a bug with event links being shown when there was really no link.

Width Fix and New Chart

I had forgot to fix the width problem for those of you on a 1024x768 monitor, so I went ahead and did a quick-fix for now. Hopefully there's no horizontal scrolling anymore.

And, I also added a new chart detailing the comparison between media type and message, allowing us to see media type (tv, radio, print, internet, etc) in relation to the quality of the coverage.

I should probably note that these charts are by no means scientific. I don't have a complete data set by any means, but I'm comfortable stating that they at least indicate some significant trends that any average person would notice if they were paying attention ;)

Major Upgrade

I just finished publishing a pretty large upgrade to the timeline tonight. It's still a significant work-in-progress, but I've cleaned things up a bit, exposed some more information, and added a new way to view the timeline data: charts. As if it wasn't painfully obvious how much blackout and negative press is going on, now you can see the data presented as a pie chart :)

Changes worth noting are:

• The timeline now displays years, months and days so the data is divided up into digestible chunks rather than one long list.
  
  
• Rolling over an event highlights the event so it's a bit easier to focus/read. The mouseovers are a little obnoxious at the moment, sorry.
  
  
• You can now click on an event to see an expanded view with more information and explanation. Additional data will eventually also be displayed here.
  
  
• The list of events is now wider so there's less wrapping and the page is shorter.
  
  
• The submission form now happens in a dialog so it doesn't waste screen real-estate.
  
  
• A new "chart view" is available showing various different plots of the same timeline data. The charts are quick and dirty right now. They'll get cleaned up as soon as I can get to them, but I figured it was good enough to give you a general idea of how interesting this data can be.
  
  The most interesting one is the pie chart which shows that blackout and negative coverage far, far outpaces positive press. I have another chart I'm preparing that will display the relationship of positive / negative / blackout to media type (tv, radio, internet, etc) which will be interesting too.

As I've mentioned before, the timeline will eventually be more interactive. As it is being presented now will eventually be renamed to something like "list view" with the timeline view becoming that more rich interactive experience.

And yes... I know the site is screwed up in Internet Explorer. I'll get to that, but you should really be using another browser anyway ;)

More to come.

Disenfranchisement

I added a new option to event type since it appears more than just a few isolated incidents of disenfranchisement and voter fraud are ocurring around the country, most recently this one in California.

And, just because a few people had submitted events as a way to send me a message, I added a contact link at the bottom of the page :)

Documenting History

America is being cheated.

Early last year I saw that there was a real need for someone to document the Ron Paul presidential campaign. Unfortunately, I couldn't talk my wife into putting our lives and our business on hold to go into debt traveling the country to document it on film like I really wanted to :)

When it became evident that the media had made it their mission to block out nearly all coverage of Ron's campaign, insult and marginalize him, his supporters and the significant grassroots events (such as the reenactments of the Boston Tea Party) that were taking place around the country, my frustration burst.

I decided to put together a compromise to filming the rEVOLution. Something that I had been thinking about a lot in the previous months ...

The Ron Paul Timline

"The Ron Paul Timeline serves as a living documentary of one of the most significant presidential campaigns in America's history. From record-setting and never before seen grassroots support to the immense and unbelievable media blackout, my goal is to document as many historical and noteworthy events as possible. Eventually, they will be presented in a rich graphical, interactive experience."

My hope is for it to become an interactive history documenting as much as possible, but I really need help putting it all together, particularly in getting all of the events into the system.

Thanks for any time you can dedicate to helping. Together, we can tell the story that America is missing.