Timeline Widget for Topics

The Topic Timeline widget shows coverage of a particular topic in mainstream news and blogs over a period of one month. Every light blue and dark blue bar represents the number of mentions for the topic in news and blogs. You can mouse over the bars to have a closer look on the coverage for that day. The widget also shows an article headline and the article source for each day.

Read more below to understand how to use this widget.

The attached timeline.zip file contains 2 main pieces of code:

• The actionscript and flash code to render the widget.
• A proxy in PHP that the widget talks to. Read more here about the proxy.

If you want to host this widget, you have to ensure that the timeline.swf file and the proxy.php file are in the same directory on the web server. You must also substitute your API key and shared secret in the proxy.php.

The zip file also contains timeline160.html that has the embed code for this widget. You can pass in the name of the topic as a flash variable using a parameter "topic". For e.g., below is the timeline for Steve Jobs: