While looking for ways to free up space on my Macbook, I found a free tool called Disk Inventory X which analyzes your files and spits out a neat visualization:

Hovering over the large green rectangle, for example, shows me that the 15 GB IE8 VDI image I downloaded today is taking up a lot of space. Colors are used to mark similar file types so the maroon blocks, for example, are MP3s.

Preceden uses a similar combination of size, color, and mouse-over details to visualize time. It’s amazing how much you can do with just those three things.

You can download Disk Inventory X for free from its website here.

There’s a famous graph that used to be on one of the dry erase boards in the Y Combinator office in Palo Alto, depicting the life of a startup.

Here’s a copy, courtesy of Inc magazine:

Preceden is somewhere in the Trough of Sorrow at the moment, though its not as bad as the name suggests. After receiving sporadic spikes of traffic over the first few weeks, the number of visitors has stabilized at about 400 per day. The challenge now is to keep pressing forward, to continue iterating, and to build something truly amazing.

On that note, I’m happy to announce that Shaun, a Salt Lake City-based software developer, has joined the effort.  He contacted me after reading about Preceden on HackerNews and after a bit of back and forth, we decided to give it a shot. I’m really excited to work with him–he’s smart, hard-working, digs timelines, and we get along really well.

Here’s to the future.

Update: The partnership between Shaun and I never went anywhere.

By analyzing the tags people use to categorize your website on Delicious, you can get a pretty good idea of how you should describe it to new visitors.

Here, for example, are the top tags used to describe Preceden:

Using the top five tags above, Preceden could be described as a free web 2.0 timeline visualization tool. Pretty good, I’d say.

One thing you have to keep in mind is the crowd that uses Delicious may differ significantly from your target audience, in which case the tags might not do you as much good. Consider what would happen if I polled the Mechanical Turk audience or my family. They’d probably say “timeline” and “tool” but how many would include “web 2.0”? How many would even know what that means? Probably not as many.

Lesson learned: choose your words carefully.

Today was an incredible day. Here’s why:

1) For the last ten days or so I’ve been working adding charting capabilities to Preceden. Since the timelines were not designed with this in mind, I had to do quite a bit of refactoring to ensure that both normal layers and chart layers would play nicely together on the same timeline.  Saturday alone I spent a solid 10 hours or so writing the final unit tests and making last minute adjustments in preparation for last night’s release. Today was the first day users got to play around with it, and that’s always an incredible rush.

2) Big news: I formed an LLC today. This has been in the works for a little while now, but today its official: I am now the proud founder of Preceden Solutions LLC (I couldn’t use Preceden LLC because it’s too similar to Precedent, which a lot of businesses apparently use).

This is a big step for me and its simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

3) To top it off, a short while ago, I checked Preceden’s daily stats to see if anything interesting was going on and was blown away to discover that Preceden was featured on Life Hacker today, the blog in the personal productivity arena. Their coverage of Preceden is the largest to date and I’m happy to say it was extremely positive:

Timelines are excellent for visualizing change over time, but most timeline generators limit you to a single timeline. Web application Preceden features parallel timelines and accompanying charts.

At Preceden you can create multiple unique timelines by adding layers to your intitial timeline. In the example image above a company’s growth is charted by the stages of the project they are designing, when employees joined the company, and the monthly visitors to the company website with all information displayed in parallel so you can easily see the connections between different segments of the data.

You can share charts for public browsing or keep them private for internal use. Timelines can be generated using spans of time ranging from years down to seconds. Preceden is a free service that requires a sign up—no email confirmation—to use.

One funny note is that the screenshot they used in the article reads “Montly Visitors” instead of “Monthy Visitors”–I was in such a rush yesterday to add an example that I neglected to proof read everything and go figure, it gets featured today in their article :) Guess I can’t complain too much…