Inspired by @cheeaun's life.
Cascade.page is a text-to-timeline tool. You write markdown-ish text and it gets converted into a nice looking cascading timeline.
Use it here.
A Cascade is composed of an optional header and one or more events.
The header of a cascade indicates things about the cascade like visual preferences and metadata. It is the first part of a cascade; that is, anything before the first event is considered the header.
Right now there are only two things you can include in the header: tag colors and date formatting. Anything else in the header area (that is, everything else before the first event that is not date formatting or tag colors) will be ignored.
You can indicate the color you want certain tagged events to appear like so:
#Travel: blue
#Education: green
#Economics: #abc // hex color
CSS color literals are supported (e.g., aliceblue
or mediumvioletred
) as well as hex colors (e.g., #a13bbb
).
So, if you have an event like the following
2012-2013: Germany and Italy #Travel
it will be colored as blue in the cascade.
Non-ISO8601 dates default to American formatting (Month/Day/Year). This can be changed to European formatting by adding the following line in the header area (before any event):
dateFormat: d/M/y
This is a hardcoded line, any other format attempt will not work.
An event is a Date Range followed by a colon followed by an event description:
12/2012: End of the world
1961: Year after 1960
Later, 1962 would happen
2020-02-22T12:13:14Z-now: How long the pandemic has been going on?
12/7/1941: Pearl Harbor attacked
Launched US into WWII
2022-02-22T16:27:08.369Z: More specific thing
2021-01-02T06:27:00Z-2022: ongoing project work until the end of 2022
A date range is a period from one date to another. Every event has an associated date range, whether it has an explicitly written end date or not. A date range is typically Date[-Date]
; that is, one date optionally followed by a dash and another date (no spaces).
If an end date is not specified, the range is as long as its granularity.
For example, the event
2001: A Space Odyssey
starts January 1, 2001, and lasts through December 31, 2001.
Example | Inferred Range | Explanation |
---|---|---|
2024 |
2024-01-01T00:00:00Z to 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z |
From the start of 2024 to the end of 2024 |
04/1776 |
1776-04-01T00:00:00Z to 1776-05-01T00:00:00Z |
From the start of July 1776 to the end of July 1776 |
01/01/2024 |
2024-01-01T00:00:00Z to 2024-01-02T00:00:00Z |
From the start of January 1, 2024, to the end of January 1, 2024 (the whole day). |
11/11/2024-12/12/2024 |
2024-11-11T00:00:00Z to 2024-12-13T00:00:00Z |
From the start of November 11, 2024, to the end of December 12, 2024. |
2031-11-19T01:35:10Z-2099-08-04T18:22:48Z |
2031-11-19T01:35:10Z to 2099-08-04T18:22:48Z |
Exactly as specific as the ISO dates say. |
A date can be expressed in a few forms. Human readable dates are supported, like 1665
, 03/2222
, or 09/11/2001
, as well as IO8601 dates, like 2031-11-19T01:35:10Z
. Human readable date formatting defaults to the American Month/Day/Year but can be changed to European formatting via the header.
An event description is everything after the date range of the event, up to the next event. Event descriptions can span multiple lines. For 12/2012: End of the world
, the event description is just End of the world
. For the following event:
1961: Year after 1960
Later, 1962 would happen
the event description is
Year after 1960
Later, 1962 would happen
Everything not on the first line (where the date range is specified) up to the next event will be put in an overflow box that can be expanded by clicking on the event. Such an overflow is indicated in the timeline with an ellipsis (...). Event descriptions can include tags, links, locations, photos, and references.
Events can be tagged to visually indicate they belong to some category. Simply add your tag text in any part of an event's description to tag it:
2022: Happy 95th Birthday Queen Elizabeth #UK #Royalty
A list of all tags appears at the bottom of the screen to allow for filtering by tags.
Links are similar to markdown links: link dislpay text in brackets followed by the url in parentheses:
2018-2021: [Google](www.google.com)
Events can have zero or more locations associated with them, indicated with the following syntax: [name of location](map|location)
09/2018: Road trip to Seattle
[Devil's Tower](location)
[Glacier National Park](map)
[Seattle](map)
An event may include a shareable, public google photos link that will be displayed once the event is clicked on. Only one photos link per event is supported.
Link to other cascades with the @
syntax:
1919: Treaty of Versailles @wwi
Events can be grouped. To indicate a group, write group
at the beginning of a line. All events up to the start of the next group, the end of the cascade, or the keyword endGroup
(whichever of these three comes first) are in the group.
For example,
group The 90s // The title for this group is "The 90s"
1991: Desert Storm
1994: Friends premiered
05/14/1998: Series finale of Seinfeld
// Since we're defining a new group here,
// the preceding group ends and is comprised of the
// previous three events.
group The 2000s
03/2005: Premiere of The Office (US)
// Explicitly end the group
endGroup
// This event is not part of a group
2020: Pandemic
...
If you want an event group to start out collapsed, indent the group
line definition.
2001: John is born
// The space here before `group`
// means the group will appear collapsed at first
group Less important events #StillCoolThough
2003: Someone else is born
...
endGroup
Item | Syntax | Example |
---|---|---|
Coloring tags | #[tag name]: <color> |
#Movies: aquamarine |
Date format. Change the formatting to European style. | dateFormat: d/M/y |
dateFormat: d/M/y |
Item | Syntax | Example |
---|---|---|
Event | [DateRange]:[EventDescription] |
08/2015-05/2017: CS degree #Education |
DateRange | [Date][-Date] |
1998-06/01/2000 |
Date. now is a special keyword which means what you think it does |
[HumanDate|ISO8601|now] |
01/30/1888 |
HumanDate. Defaults to American formatting (Month/Day/Year, can be overridden in header) | [m/d-]yyyy |
2002 or 01/2002 or 12/25/1901 |
ISO8601 format. The T and Z are required. |
YYYY-MM-DD THH:MM:SS:MS Z |
1859-05-09T12:01:01Z |
Event description | ([text]|[Tag]|[Location]|[Link]|[Photos])* |
07/2014: 4th of July in DC https://photos.app.goo.gl/d418j6GSkCD5LGmY8 #Travel @sue @greg [Washington, DC](location) |
Tag | #[tag name] |
1999: The Matrix #Movies |
Location | [location name](location|map) |
02/23/1836: Battle of the Alamo (The Alamo, TX)[map] |
Link | [display text](link) |
05/25/2021: [cascade.page](https://cascade.page) featured on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282842) |
Photos. Has to be a public link! Currently only one photo link per event is supported. | <something that looks like a google photos shareable link> |
07/2017: 4th of July in DC https://photos.app.goo.gl/d418j6GSkCD5LGmY8 |
Reference. Reference and link to other cascades. | @[other cascade name] |
09/2019: Dinner with @karl or 2020-2022: COVID-19 Pandemic @jenny/covid @covidcascade |
Comment | //[text] |
// this is a comment |
To save a cascade to your computer, click the Save...
button while on the Editor tab of the sidebar. It will be saved locally, and you can come back and edit or view it later, as long as it's on the same device.
You can view cascades that you've saved from the profile tab of the sidebar.
To share a cascade with a link, you will need to make an account. You can make an account by sending yourself a signin link from the profile page. Once signed in, you will need to choose a username from which your cascades will be hosted. For example, if you choose the name jeff
, all your cascades will be accessible from https://cascade.page/jeff/...
. If you share a cascade with the same name as your username, it will be accessible from https://cascade.page/[your username]/
, otherwise, it will be accessible from https://cascade.page/[your username]/[cascade name]
.
All in all, the steps are:
- Send yourself a signin link from the profile tab.
- Click the link to login.
- Choose a username - all your shared cascades will be available from
https://cascade.page/[your username]/...
- Share your cascade
Any cascade you share is public by default - anyone could view it. Any cascade you save locally only on your computer is, of course, only accessible on that device.