How TimeStrands works

Why a timeline, and why this one

A list of dates is not a story. A timeline is. It puts events in order and side by side, so cause and effect become visible at a glance. That is why the chronology is the shared language of historians, product teams, journalists and anyone trying to explain how something came to be.

TimeStrands exists because most tools stop working exactly when a real story gets interesting: the moment it reaches past a century, runs in parallel threads, or rests on evidence that is less than exact.

What ordinary timeline tools cannot do

• Deep time breaks them. Spreadsheets and chart tools treat a year as a plain number, so they fall apart as soon as you cross into BCE. TimeStrands runs from 10,000 BCE to the future on a single axis.
• Parallel stories collide. One row cannot show Egypt, Greece and China advancing at the same time. Tracks keep competing histories readable instead of piled on top of each other.
• Fuzzy facts get rounded into lies. History rarely hands you an exact day. TimeStrands stores a date as precise, or as vague, as the evidence allows.
• Context gets lost. A date with no source is just an assertion. Sources travel with every event, so readers can check the claim.
• The output is trapped. Screenshots and PDFs cannot be zoomed, updated or reused. TimeStrands publishes to a link and embeds anywhere.

What you get instead

• One canvas for many stories, published to a canonical, shareable URL.
• A viewer your readers can pan and zoom through ten thousand years, fetching only the events on screen.
• Source-cited events, so provenance survives exports, embeds and remixes.
• Data that stays yours: export to JSON or CSV and re-import at any time.

The words you will see

TimeStrands uses a small, consistent vocabulary. Here is every term you need before you start.

• Timeline is one canvas for one story. Once published it has its own URL and a visibility setting.
• Track is a swimlane for a single thread of the story, such as a civilization, a product line, a person or a system. Give each its own colour.
• Event is a dated mark inside a track. It is either a point (a single moment) or a range (a start and an end).
• Precision is how exact an event is, from millennium and century down to the millisecond. You choose the precision the evidence supports.
• Circa is a flag for approximate dates. It is separate from precision, so "circa 1200 BCE" stays both approximate and century-level.
• Source is a citation attached to an event: a URL, a title, a publisher and an access date.
• Visibility decides who can see a published timeline: unlisted (link only), protected (link plus PIN) or public (indexable). Private means it is still a draft.
• Embed is a single line of HTML that drops the live viewer into any website, document or learning platform.

Behind the scenes: time that behaves

You never have to do this arithmetic yourself. It matters only because it explains why TimeStrands holds up where other tools do not. Every date is stored as a single signed integer, so one column can run from the Stone Age to the future. Negative numbers mean BCE: -3100 is 3100 BCE.

Precision is stored next to the date, never baked into it. A fuzzy fact stays fuzzy, and an approximate one carries its "circa" flag on top of its precision rather than pretending to be exact.

Build your first timeline

1. Create an account and open the dashboard. A personal organization is set up for you automatically.
2. Create a timeline and give it a title and a summary. Nothing is public until you publish.
3. Add a track for each story thread and give it a colour.
4. Add events to each track. Choose the precision that matches the facts, add a source link, then reorder until the story reads cleanly.
5. Preview as you go. The private preview uses the same viewer your audience will see.

Publish and embed

Publishing mints a globally unique public slug and a canonical URL. Public timelines are indexable and free forever; unlisted and protected (link plus PIN) timelines are part of the paid plans.

Every published timeline can also be embedded as a responsive iframe. Copy the snippet from the publish panel and drop it into your site, docs or LMS.

<iframe src="https://timestrands.com/t/your-slug/embed" style="width:100%;height:520px;border:0" loading="lazy" title="Your timeline"></iframe>

Research with an assistant

The research assistant is a conversation, not a single-timeline widget. Each message is an order: pick a target timeline, describe what you want plotted, and the assistant reads Wikipedia and writes tracks and events with sources attached.

Orders run in the background. The composer never waits — place another order whenever you like, even to a different timeline — and jobs keep working while you navigate elsewhere. Open the bell in the header, or the Background jobs page, to watch progress, cancel, or retry a job that failed.

The same capability is available to external tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so agents like Claude, opencode and Cursor can build alongside you.