Time Passes…

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About

Time Passes is a timeline of your life, world history, and the universe.

You can use it to keep a record of important events in your and your family's life. Or use it to keep a daily journal.

See the Help section for more information.

Privacy

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 —

Contact

Feedback 〜 Twitter

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Help

Navigation

Use vertical scroll or the up/down arrow keys to zoom the timeline
Use horizontal scroll or the left/right arrow keys to pan the timeline
Use the drop-down menu and arrow buttons to jump quickly to set time periods
Click on an event for more information about it

Adding events

Click on the timeline background to add an event at that date
You must be Signed In to add events
In the Add Event form, click on the ⓘ︎ icons ( try it! ) for information about each form field.
- click again to hide
See also the Guidelines for Adding Events.

FAQs

Why do you use YYYY-MM-DD for the date format?: Because it's clear, unambiguous, and an international standard. Seriously, stop using D/M/Y and M/D/Y — it's confusing.

Start and End dates should be in the Gregorian calendar. See Dates and Calendars for more information.
Why are so many important events missing?: The events shown are determined by whoever contributes. Please feel free to add any you think should be here.

See also the Guidelines for Adding Events.
What does 'visibility' mean?: 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+.

See A Guide to Visibility for more information.
Can I share my private events?: Not yet. I hope to add shared events in the future.
Can I download a copy of my events?: Yes. See: Download Events.
Is there a way to upload events?: Yes, but only for private events. See: Import Events.

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Guidelines for Adding Events

Public Events

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.
Title: , , , , <q>, <cite> allowed.
Location: , , , allowed.
Description: most HTML tags will work.

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Dates and Calendars

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.

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A Guide to Visibility

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.

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Statistics

Number of events at each level of visibility:

Visibility	Public events	Private events

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Technology

This site is built with:

Vanilla JS and CSS (no front-end frameworks)
Userbase for data storage. Data is end-to-end encrypted, so it's private
DOMPurify for text sanitising
Digital Ocean App Platform for hosting
Simple Analytics for user stats. Simple Analytics doesn't track you or collect any personal data
Proton Mail for email
Buy me a coffee for donations
GitHub for code hosting
and it was written in BBEdit on an old MacBook Pro

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View Event

Start Date:
End Date:
Visibility:
Shared:
Category:
Link:
	edit event \| delete event

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Add Event

Must be signed in to add events

Private Event Public Event
ⓘ︎ ☜ (more information)

Public events can be seen by everyone.
Private events by you only.
See the Guidelines for Adding Events

Title (required)

ⓘ︎

The title shows in the timeline. Keep it short.

Start Date (required)

ⓘ

Use DD Month YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD.
D/M/Y and M/D/Y won't work!

If you know the precise time, you can use full ISO-8861 datetime format (including timezone!).

For 'deep time' events, use years only
(negative for deep past, positive for deep future).

End Date

ⓘ︎

Optional: not required for single-day events.
For multiple-day events add an end date.
For ongoing events use 'now', 'present' or 'ongoing'.

Use the same format as Start Date.

Date

ⓘ︎

A more readable form of the date, that appears when hovering over an event in the timeline. You'll probably want to edit it.

Note that this can be a Julian (or other calendar) date for historical events not usually given in the Gregorian calendar.

Location

ⓘ︎

Use lat-long or a human readable location.

Description

ⓘ︎

A brief summary of what happened.
Use the 'link' field below to link to more information.

Visibility

ⓘ︎ Position ⓘ︎

Visibility controls the time scale at which an event is visible in the timeline. If you set the visibility of events too high, the timeline will appear too crowded.

Note: the current visibility is displayed in the top right of the timeline. ↗︎

For events that have both a start and end date, you can set the vertical position (in number of lines from the bottom of the timeline, zero = off). It's used to set the position of the geological eons, eras, and epochs, and for other era-type events. Use sparingly!

Edit Event

Must be signed in to edit events

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Delete Event

Must be signed in to delete events

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Search Events

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Download Events

Must be signed in to download events

Download a copy of your private events as:

The files should appear in your downloads folder.

You can also Import Events.

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Import Events

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

Must be signed in to import events

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Sign In

Sign In, or Register for a new account:

Signed In

You are signed in as: .

Update user details?

Please save a backup of your events.

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Update User Details

You must be signed in to change you details.

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Forgotten Password

To recover your password you need:

To have previously set your email address
Your username
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.