Interactive Historical Atlas of the World

[Alcibaides]

Hey guys,

If anybody has been wondering where I've been for the last few months, the answer is that I have been super busy creating a brand new website: ChronoAtlas.com, the first fully interactive historical atlas of the world!

The site allows you to browse the entire globe at any point in history and see boundaries changing over time and cities and other features appearing on the map at the time they were founded. The site is also 100% interactive, you can contribute your own data: meaning your own cities, battles, and photos of historic places and events, and you can also draw boundaries of any historical kingdom you want, or edit those drawn by others if they are inaccurate.

You need to have either Google Earth or the Google Earth plug-in to view the site, if you don’t have it then it will prompt you to install the plug-in on your first visit.

For optimum performance I recommend installing the latest version of Google Earth or the Google Earth plug-in and using Internet Explorer as your browser.

The site has just been launched so feel free to suggest improvements or if you get any error messages then please let me know and I will try to fix them. There are also some video tutorials on how to do stuff if you get stuck.

Thanks and I hope you enjoy using the site as much as I did building it.

[Ingvar]

This sounds awesome Alcibaides. I will take a good look at this soon!
I assume getting Google-Earth is not a problem?

[Alcibaides]

Google Earth is free. When you visit the site (ChronoAtlas.com), if you do not already have it it will prompt you if you want to install it. It takes a few minutes to install and then you are golden.

[McMonkey]

Can't wait to look at this. Slight problem though. When I click on the 'Download the Google Earth Plug-In' nothing happens, the hyperlink doesn't seem to be activated. I will try and get the plugin from Google, just thought you might like to know in case others are having the same problem.

[McMonkey]

Could I also make a suggestion? I make great use of bookmarks since starting using the Google Chrome browser. Most professional sites have an bookmark Icon so that I can have the site on my bookmark bar and it does not take up much room. With sites like Chrono Atlas (and the SL Wiki) the bookmark Icon is just a blank sheet of paper so I gave to include a description. Do you know how to give your site an Icon, and if so how is it done as I will do the same for the SL Wiki!

Example:



And before you ask the PVC1 bookmark is about UPVC Fascias and Guttering, nothing kinky

[Alcibaides]

Thanks a lot for the feedback on the download link not working. I must say that I have not heard that as an issue from anyone else, might be a Chrome issue.....

As far as Google Chrome goes, I think I have tested everything in Google Chrome and it all works, but for optimum performance use Internet Explorer.

Technically it also works in Mozilla FF, but it tends to crash a lot because Mozilla cannot handle Google Earth properly. But I believe Mozilla are unleashing a FireFox 8.0 stable release this November so maybe they will fix their kinks.

The icon you are referring to is known as a favicon I believe. I have made one in the past for ExploretheMed but it looked awful so I never used it, the problem is you only have a few pixels to work with. But I will put it on the list of updates needed.

[McMonkey]

Just been back to the site and there is a little pointy finger cursor when I hover over the Plug-In link now. Perhaps the site (or my Chrome) were encountering problems yesterday. Taking a look now.

You should post this at the Scenario League too, I think a lot of the members there would be very interested!

[McMonkey]

This is very cool. I will be watching this sites progress and if I have the time (and skill) I will try and contribute too. This is a very interesting new concept and will be useful as a reference tool and as an educational one as well as being fun to just browse. Great work Ga!

[Alcibaides]

Just been back to the site and there is a little pointy finger cursor when I hover over the Plug-In link now. Perhaps the site (or my Chrome) were encountering problems yesterday. Taking a look now.

Actually that doesn't surprise me. Clearly the people working on Google Earth are totally different from the people working on Google Chrome. The right-hand doesn't know what the left is doing to the extent that they built a plug-in that works much better in the browser of their biggest rival. The Plug-in loads twice as fast in Interent Explorer, plus I am trying to develop some new functionality now that works perfect in IE and is even working in Mozilla but it keeps causing Chrome to crash....

[Alcibaides]

This is very cool. I will be watching this sites progress and if I have the time (and skill) I will try and contribute too.

It shouldn't take too much skill. The adding point data such as cities, castles, etc. should be really easy. You could start by adding in your home town, for choosing an image of something historical, you can probably find something on commons.wikimedia.com

The adding boundaries part is a little more tricky as it requires you to draw on the map, but it is still not that hard. I have created a video tutorial to get people started on youtube. Once you log-in and go to the contribute menu you will see the video tutorials.

[Alcibaides]

You should post this at the Scenario League too, I think a lot of the members there would be very interested!

Do you mean the section of the CivFanatics Forum? I have posted it at CivFanatics forum under the section "World History", I would not want to post it under another section aswell as the admins might think i am spamming it.

But if you want to post a link to it whereever you think it would get the most attention then go ahead.

[McMonkey]

The Scenario League is an autonomous forum hosted by Civ Fanatics and I am a moderator there and I'm sure the other members of the SL would love to see this site. To be honest I rarely look at any of the other forums at Civ Fanatics, I just don't have the time. If you hadn't posted here I may not have heard about it. Best to publicise it everywhere you can!

[Alcibaides]

Just a quick update on the ChronoAtlas.com project.

I have inputted a lot more historical nations into the map now, including virtually the entire history of China, most of the history of the Middle East, and the Colonial Empires of Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Holland.

There are also a handful of other people contributing stuff but not much really, there is certainly not any real community of contributors there yet.

I was wondering if somebody from here could help me translating a quick introduction to the site that I could post in the general history discussion board on this site (i.e. here):
http://civforum.de/forumdisplay.php?f=34

I could run it through the google translator and maybe someone could check the grammar.