Yesterday, I sat down with Remy and went over the last of the things we need to do to close out the summer. There was a long list of items, split into two sections, each containing the same sort of stuff. FOSS@RIT has done a lot of stuff in the past year, and we need to be able to tell people about it.

The first section concerned the few things we had done that hadn't yet hit Timeline. This was a fairly sizable chunk of things, and we needed a good, rapid-entry way of getting more events in there. No problem, I had done some work on that before, I could get it running and dump events in there no problem.

The second (and slightly longer) list dealt with things we needed to compile some information about as a sort of "here's what we've done" report. The list of things that needed to be in that was... just about the same as the last one. Remy planned to go through the Timeline site and add entries from it, categorize them, and push it to foss.rit.edu.

This deeply concerned me on two distinct levels. First was the part of me that never liked writing. I've mentioned it here once before, and I feel I've gotten better since then, but the concept of wading through all that data to write a report was not something that made me happy. The other part was that all the things in the second list had to be added to the timeline at some point anyway, or were likewise available from other sources. When Remy showed me what he had written for 2010, it was obvious this could be easily replicated in code.

About an hour of JavaScript wrangling later, I had made this. Also this, and if you're reading this from about a year in the future, this should even exist. It's still needs some tweaking, the years are hardcoded in the documents, the pages aren't linked from the main timeline page, and I'd rather have them all use one common file than make a new one each year, but it works, it's fairly similar to what was handwritten last year, and it gets updated every time something gets added to Timeline.