Sometimes you know how long an event lasted, but you don't know exactly when it ended.

Say you saw a movie which started at 9:43pm and it lasted 2 hours, 22 minutes. In the past if you wanted to make an event on a Preceden timeline representing that movie, you'd have to calculate when it ended and enter the new date and time (12:05am) into as the end date.

A Better Way

Now you can include an offset in either the start or end date. Consider the previous example:

This will work for either the start or end date and you can add or subract offsets from the date.

Present + 1 year 6 months 10 seconds

May 2006 + 15 months

June 2010 - 3 months

June 20, 2006 10:20pm - 3 hours 42 minutes

One frequent request has been support "Present" as a start date. You could use this as a countdown, for example, if you want to know how long from the current date until something will occur. With this latest update, you can do that too.

Enjoy!

Preceden now has a Twitter account which you can follow here.

One of the common requests has been for better zooming.

Now when you zoom in, if there are no events in the span of time that you are zooming in to, Preceden will figure out the closest event to that location and show that span of time instead. You'll never zoom in to a blank timeline again.

Enjoy!

You asked for it, you got it: You can now embed your timelines in other websites.

Simply click the "Embed Code" link below any timeline and you'll be taken to a page with the necessary HTML. Copy and paste that onto your website and voila, your visitors can view the timeline on your website.

This is a brand new feature -- if you run into any problems or have any suggestions on how it can be improved, please let me know by sending an email to support@preceden.com.

Thanks!

Thanks to a few positive reviews the last few days, Preceden has seen a lot of activity recently.

A special thanks to each of the following sites for their kind words:

• App Everyday - Build a Timeline for your Website with Preceden
• wwwhatsnew.com - Preceden – Crea y comparte cronogramas en Internet or the translation
• Pedagotic - Créer des lignes du temps facilement or the translation
• Блог toodoo - Preceden - наглядное планирование or the translation
• Web2Null - Preceden: Timelines erstellen or the translation

Twitter also brought in a lot of traffic due to Tweets and Retweets about Preceden -- thank you all for spreading the word.

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One Preceden user, a teacher, emailed me to report that she was running into problems creating a restricted-access timeline to use in with her students. After a bit of investigating, I discovered the problem and realized that it was preventing everyone from creating restricted-access timelines. I'm happy to say that the issue has been fixed, and everyone should now be able to do it.

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I've been making small tweaks to the layout the last several days. If you notice anything you don't like, be it the size of the font or the color of a link, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

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Few major updates planned for this weekend:

• Print timelines
• Embed timelines in other websites

Both of these are at the top of the todo list as a result of feedback, so if you have any ideas, please let me know.

On that note, I'll be using UserVoice more heavily in the future. I changed the "Feedback" link at the top of the page to "Suggestions" and it now takes you directly to Preceden's UserVoice page, which will let you share your ideas and vote on other peoples' ideas. Your feedback helps me determine what to implement next. The more feedback, the better!

Today Preceden was featured on FeedMyApp, a service that reviews Web 2.0 sites and applications.

It's not much, but you can check it out here.

KillerStartups, a site that reviews new web startups, posted an article today about Preceden.

Here's a snippit:

Preceden is a new tool that is entirely web-based. In very general terms, it lets you organize important events into multiple layers. This makes it very easy to put everything into perspective and see how events relate to each other as time goes by.

You can read the full article here.

Few updates today:

• New users will receive an email welcoming them to Preceden
• There is now a "Forgot Password" option on the sign in page, which will email you a reset password link if you ever forget it
• You can now sign in wither either your user name or your email address.
• Preceden now has a blog. Posterous, our blogging service, makes it super easy.
• The "Feedback" link, which was at the bottom of the page with the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, is now on the top right of the navigation bar along with the blog link. I want to hear what you have to say, and this makes it easier.

As always, if you have any feedback please let me know.

Preceden has a blog!

I'll use it primarily to make announcements about updates I've made to Preceden.

I'd also like to use this as an additional way to communicate with everyone who uses Preceden. If you have an idea or advice on how to make Preceden better, you can email me, post your idea on Preceden's UserVoice page, or leave a comment here.

I look forward to working with you all to make Preceden the number one timeline site on the net.

Matt