Timeline: Alan Johnston Missing
Originally uploaded by Lilly.

You may have tried Google Spreadsheet to Map wizard that was mentioned in the Google Map API Blog by now. Nice and easy, isn’t it? It’s part of JSON support for Gdata. So I gave it a whirl.

I instantly thought I would use it to populate SIMILE Timeline.

First l looked for a practical source of data and I chose BBC’s Timeline of Alan Johnston to show support for him. I have created a spreadsheet manually, but I believe it’s worth doing. Here it is - Alan Johnston missing in a SIMILE Timeline widget.

There are JSON examples at Google Code. I used Google Doodle calendar in Timeline as template. Also check the Timeline Wiki for more examples.

I’ve found Michael Bolin’s JSON Inspector very useful when checking JSON output.

Note that I used the BBC’s favicon link as icon for Timeline’s event object, which is shown in FireFox, but not in IE.

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