The timeline project is a ruby script to be used as a plug-in for Google Sketch.

References:
   * http://dl.google.com/sketchup/gsu6/GoogleSketchUpMEN.dmg
   * http://sketchup.google.com/download/rubyscripts.html

Today being the occasion of my 50th birthday, and my practice being to update a timeline covering my life to date on this day every decade or so, I decided to write a script to do this rather than use some arbitrary graphics program (which never seem to hang around for 10 years anyway). I anticipate exporting the output as a tiff and jpeg, as well as saving the object definitions as a Google .kmz file. Hopefully that format will live on till my 60th.

In any case the data will be encoded in ruby and I'll have had fun.

Steps:
  1) Script will install a menu item to call the drawing routines.
  2) Drawing methods will be read from a file and executed.
  3) Methods will be defined for drawing axes, locations, schools, jobs, etc.

Possibilities (time permitting):
  a) Add object creation from the Draw menu.
  b) Editing of drawing items from a contextual menu

Futures:
  i) Handle intelligent placement to minimize overlap
  ii) Hotlink place-names to google maps or wikipedia, schools to facebook
  iii) Read in biographical data from Linked-In, Facebook etc.
  
*** Work Suspended ***

Turns out you cannot access the Ruby standard libraries (like yaml) from SketchUp which sort of defeats the purpose of using Ruby. You can include any arbitrary file using a full path require in the source, but if it requires any other file you're screwed. In the absence of a way to set the Ruby environment with SketchUp to add the site_path to ruby the whole concept is a non-starter.

Perhaps in time I'll revisit using some of the ruby graphic libraries to write directly to a web-page...