The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
Your private events are encrypted on the server and in transit and cannot be seen by other users or by the site admins. Public events can be seen by all users of this site.
This site does not use cookies, track users, or share any user data. We collect some aggregate user statistics (visits, usage, etc.), but no other personal data is collected or stored.
Support
Time Passes is free to use, and contains no advertising. If you would like to help support Time Passes, please —
Visibility is the time scale at which an event becomes visible in the timeline. You can think of it as (very roughly) an event's importance.
Events in human history should be in the range of 0–10, but "deep-time" events can go up to 300+.
Public events are seen by all users. You are welcome to add any interesting or noteworthy event you think should be here: if an event has a Wikipedia page or an article on a public news site, then it's good enough for Time Passes. Keep the description to a few lines. Public events may be edited at any time.
Use publicly known event dates. Many events are preceded by a long period of planning and production that may not have been public knowledge at the time, and can generally be left out unless it was particularly noteworthy or controversial. In such cases, they can be added as separate events to the main event itself. Readers can go to the linked article if they want more detail.
For example:
buildings and large constructions: use the 'first sod turned' to public opening date.
famous ships and aircraft: use the launch date or first flight date.
space missions: use the launch and landing dates.
books: use the publication date.
music: use the first live performance date if available, or the publication date of recordings.
movies, plays, and exhibitions: use the opening date.
people: the death of a famous person is a noteworthy event, but their birth and most of their life usually isn't, so just add the date of their death. Any important events they were part of can be added as separate events.
Private Events
Private events are seen by you only, so add whatever you like. I find it most interesting when there is a mix of the important (births, deaths, marriages) and the mundane (what you did today). Use the visibility input to control when events are visible: set your most important life events to 7+, and daily journal type enteries to around 2.
Please save a regular backup of your events. See Download Events.
You can also bulk upload private events. See Import Events.
Time Passes doesn't store photos or other media, but you can use the link field to link to them if they are online, or you can link to social media posts.
Remember that dates on a timeline are just signposts, and "the map is not the territory". If this timeline helps you remember a few events then it has done its job.
Text Formatting
The title, location, and description fields can be formatted with with a subset of markdown syntax and/or HTML tags. All other fields are plain-text only.
The markdown tags available: bold, italics, lists.
Time Passes uses the proleptic Gregorian calendar, with astronomical year numbering. That means that we extend the Gregorian calendar back in time to before its introduction, and that we assume a year zero (i.e. 1 BC = year 0, 2 BC = year -1, etc.)
The Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and adopted adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe, followed by the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries over the next three centuries. Most non-western countries have also adopted it, at least for civil use.
Historical events before 15 October 1582 are typically given in the Julian calendar, and events after that date may be in Julian or Gregorian depending on the calendar in use locally. The British Empire (including the American colonies), for example, used the Julian calendar until 14 September 1752.
When adding events to Time Passes, the Start Date and End Date should use the Gregorian calendar. The plain Date field should be the Julian date if that was used at the time and location in question.
If in doubt, just use the dates you have — the difference is 13 days at most, which is only noticeable when zoomed in at the year range anyway.
Visibility is the time scale at which an event becomes visible in the timeline. When an event's visibility is less than the visibility shown in the top right of the timeline, it will be hidden.
More technically, visibility = log10( years per pixel ) + 8
On a practical level, if you set the visibility of events too high, the timeline will become too crowded. As a rough guide, use the following table:
Most important events of:
set visibility to:
the week
< 3
the month
3 – 4
the year
4 – 5
the decade
5 – 6
the century
6 – 7
the millenia
7 – 8
all of human history
8 – 10
the last million years
10 – 11
geological time
9 – 15
the history of the universe
15+
See Statistics for a table that shows the number of events at each visibility level.
You can bulk import private events as a JSON file. First download your existing events as a JSON file. If you don't have any, try creating a few first. Then copy the format for additional events.
Notes:
An ItemId will be created for new events, so leave that blank (use empty quotes: "")
Existing events will be updated (instead of re-added) as long as you keep the ItemId the same
The createdBy and updatedBy fields will be ignored on import (otherwise you would need to update all the timestamps)
It's worth validating your JSON file to try to catch any mistakes before you try to upload it. Many code editors can do this, or you could try an online validator
Access to a device you have previously logged into Time Passes on
Private event data is encrypted on the server and the site admins have no way to recover it
— only you can recover it, and only if you have the three things above.
