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Creating · chapter 11 of 13

Timelines

Join the Dots: moments threaded in order.

Join the Dots threads a handful of photos and passages into one line through time. It's the form for anything where order is the meaning: the five weeks of a trip, a house renovation, a childhood - or a whole life remembered, which is exactly what it does in About Gloria.

Dots on a thread

Each dot is a card - a photo or a passage of words - sitting on the thread with an optional marker underneath (a date works beautifully; leave it empty for none). Adding is the same gesture as everywhere: a green + on each card drops a new dot right after it.

the Join the Dots editor - adding a dot
The Join the Dots editor with the add slot open, offering Photo or Text, amid real timeline cards with date markers and link fields
"Add to the timeline: Photo or Text" - dots take a marker, a style, and can link onward to a story.
  • Photo dots pick from the library and take a style - square, wide, tall or round.
  • Text dots are for the connective tissue: "and then the ferry", "the year everything changed".
  • Any dot can link to a story. Click its Link field and start typing a title - the archive autocompletes, and the dot becomes a doorway. A timeline of twelve dots can quietly index a whole shelf of stories.
  • Size and order controls sit at the top: small, medium or large dots, and a flip-order switch when you'd rather tell it backwards.
Timeline vs Journey: if your photos carry GPS and the story is about where, the Journey draws the map for you. Join the Dots is the one that cares about when.
storyus.life/+demos/jointhedots-eurotrip
The finished Join the Dots timeline: the trip's moments threaded in order down the page
The outcome: one thread, in order - the same dots, read.

See finished ones

The EuroTrip timeline for a trip in order, and About Gloria for the form doing its most serious work: a life, remembered in sequence.