u/pengd0t

I’ve found that often what I use canvas for is laying out timelines of events. What typically happens though is that I end up with a couple of parallel streams of events for context… and then every time I add a new parallel timeline I have to move everything to keep them actually lined up so that it’s actually useful to visually see timeline context and that’s what takes the most time.

For example if you were laying out your family history on a timeline, and had a parallel timeline with general historical events to give the family history context. Or maybe you’re an author trying to keep track of where multiple characters are across time in parallel storylines. That’s what I’m talking about.

Has anyone found a good solution for this? I’ve got a plugin I’m working on to help but I’m curious if this problem has already been solved.

We homeschool 5 kids, and we’ve previously done things for reading challenges like print out a giant poster where kids could color in spaces for each book they read to track things and compete with each other.

I’m currently building a tool that allows each to log in and record what they read in a reading log. It gives points based on how long the book is, and has silly unlockable achievements that pop up and attach to your profile when you’ve unlocked them. Main page is a big leaderboard showing points and achievements, with a feed of recent events below that.

This is more in line with the way they compete with everything else in general. The home library isn’t going to win the fight against the video game library all the time, but the same things that make gaming competition engaging can be attached to reading.

My question is… has anyone else found a tool that does this sort of thing in a fun and engaging way already? Anything I’ve found was very expensive.

I’ve mostly built what I had in mind. If you have a tool you like that does anything similar, what else does it do that makes it really good?

I’ve considered adding accelerated reader style tests for the books, but doing it by just having a chat bot pop up and ask a few 4-5 questions about the book you’re adding… so it doesn’t really feel like a test. I doubt I could do this part for free though… so this is more of a back burner idea for now.