Website Update: Timeline View and Location Filter

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2019-02-08 17:34:14,
2019-02-18 20:46:41
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Hey y'all! Bet you didn't think the library was going to get too many updates?

Well, I've been hearing folks, and the one thing I've been asked for and thinking about most was more ways to look through all the content posted here, stories and world building blogs and such.

I had been reluctant to touch the code because of the complexities around authors and co-authors on the backend of things, but I decided people would rather have these new options without author filtering than not at all — which is why it's an either-or situation with these new options and the classic author filter option.

There's still room for improvement here-and-there, but I'm not expecting more large-scale improvements to this — just tweaks.

Timeline

You can sort from most-to-least recent or oldest-to-newest. There is also a heading telling you the in-world dates the current page spans (there's an odd bug with this that I'm not sure if I'll bother to fix).

Stories with multiple date/times associated (like how Demons cuts between a current time and a flashback) will appear multiple times in the list. I'm pretty proud of the backend database trickery to get this right without having multiples in a row (like how "An Oral History of the Great Demon War" originally appeared while working on this.

Obviously, it's always sorted by in-world time, so the classic sorting options wouldn't make sense in this view.

Location

Library pieces can also have multiple locations, so please tag both general (country) and specific (town) locations in your pieces.

Where's My Story?

You have to actually add location and date/time information to your stories to show up in the lists of these new options. 

So please take the time to tag all your stuff with the right information. The options have been there for a long time now, but now it's extra important!

How Do I Date This Old Story?

Since most of us wrote our stories "present day" you can look to when you posted it and subtract 110 from the year. Also, look to major events like Masquerade Mayhem or Discovery Day and figure out if your stories need to take place before or after those. Or check other stories you might have done as a collab with another author who had been using dates and times already.