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.

• Cascade.page
  • Table of contents
  • Cascade
    • Header
      • Tags and colors
      • Date formatting
    • Events
      • Date Ranges
        • Dates
      • Event Description
        • Tags
        • Links
        • Locations
        • Photos
        • References
    • Groups
  • Header Quick Reference
  • Event Quick Reference
  • Saving and sharing
  • Public by default

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.

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

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:

1. Send yourself a signin link from the profile tab.
2. Click the link to login.
3. Choose a username - all your shared cascades will be available from https://cascade.page/[your username]/...
4. 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.