This last weekend I created a website that allows you to plugin events, actors and data to create an interactive timeline, I set one up in regard to the housing bubble by pulling together some articles about it off of Mises.org. I didn’t have the time to make it too thorough because I was also spending time programming it but you can get the idea of what I mean by looking here:
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
I’m going to bump this one more time as a last stand but if I still don’t get any feedback I suppose that should give me the clue that this sort of thing doesn’t attract much attention in the first place, hence probably not a very good idea after all 
Nice and clean. I like. I don’t know if an easy timeline creating app. The only issue I have, is the whole page can’t be loaded on a single page.
Bookmarked. I think you did a good job - aesthetically pleasing.
One suggestion would be to add a overall line graph for the two data plots at the end of the sequence.
Great idea, but the Community Reinvestment Act was 10/12/77.
Thank you all for your feedback, seeing a positive reaction I will continue working on this project. For those of you who have already commented I put your usernames at the bottom of the page on the website thanking you, also here are my responses:
Thank you and I have re-designed the page so that everything would fit in a single page. The charts and text areas are a little smaller but things still fit nicely now in one view without the need for scrolling the entire page.
Thank you, I have done as you suggested and now when you scroll over to the last event it will display all of the available data plotted by year so you can see the curve across the entire lifespan of the timeline.
Thanks for the correction, I have updated the date to match the date you gave me.
One last thing, this domain name is just a dummy domain name until I was sure I wanted to keep it up, but now that I will keep working on it I was thinking of buying a more descriptive domain name, here are some that are available:
http://www.howthefedscrewed.us
http://www.thehousingcrises.com
http://www.whatcausedthehousingbubble.com
If anyone has any other ideas feel free to offer them, thanks!
Well done, I’m impressed. I will forward this to people who have short term memory lose, heh.
Seems like it has the potential to be a great resource for someone looking to write a paper on the housing crises. I like the fact you took the origin of this crisis back some years, contrary to the popular notion that everything that’s wrong with hosuing, occured in the last 10 years or so.
Looks good.
Thanks for the positive feedback everyone, I’ll keep working on it. Think I’ll drop in a video of Bernanke in 2005 denying a bubble and a different video of Schiff or Paul getting laughed at for calling the bubble before it popped.
Looks great. The only issue I have is that it seems a lit-tle too wide for a 1024x768 resolution. 
Thanks! Shoot you are of the 13%'ers that still use that resolution eh? Hah. Well it didn’t use to be so wide but I widened it so it would all fit vertically in one page without the need for scrolling, I could make it smaller but I would have to srink the charts area.
By the way I moved it to a new url: www.whatcausedthehousingbubble.com … I was surprised it wasn’t taken already, pretty nifty. I’m going to spend time this weekend working on the content, adding stuff and getting it to flow better. Still need to talk about the origins of Fannie Mae and gotta put a video of Bernanke denying the bubble in 2005 (while the Austrians were calling it)
Nice work. The If the block on the right can be replaced with other data this might me very useful for representation of other historical events.
Yea I programmed it so you can plot ANY dataset, I just need x (date), y (value) and it will plot the data depending on the date of the event you are looking at in the timeline.
I meant displaying other data formats such as pictures or video or some type of plugin.
Sorry for the late reply, yes this is something I am considering doing since I want to show more visuals. I don’t want to bore the reader with too much text and all charts.
I have been updating the content on my free time (there is more now up). It turns out that there is a lot more to the details and causes than I thought. It seems the more I put on there the more I have to add just to keep a cohesive string of events and tie everything together. This “little” project I thought would take just a weekend to do has been eating up all of my free time hah, but it’s worth it for me and I’m learning a ton, love it =)
Here’s the link again for those who didn’t see it:
http://www.whatcausedthehousingbubble.com/
Still a work in progress but there’s already a lot on there now.
Great work! What, if one would create a big time line that shows major financial crisis or important turning points? With a click on such a point you jump into a smaller timeline specifically for the selected crisis like the housing bubble etc… I think such an idea has a huge potential.
It would give you a great overview and a fast access to information. But of course it is a f*** lot of work.
Thanks! And after some research on this one topic I realized that the Great Depression, Housing bubble, Stock Market bubble all are connected and interrelated. So you are right a big time line is needed, especially to actually give you the full picture I would need a master timeline and then the sub timelines for each different financial crises. It would be intense and it would be equally hard to present ALL the information without overwhelming the reader.
That is really awesome. You’ve done a great job so far. The first thing I thought of that I would like to see is time labels on the timeline itself…like a small label at each point where you have milestone to talk about.
This way, you can have an overview of just how long the timeline is, and have a visual representation of the amount of time between each milestone. Do you know what I’m saying? Like instead of just the generic line at the top, if there is a way you could have labels all along it that would at least name the year, and have a line guiding to the specific spot on the timeline, of each spot where the journey stops.
Also (and I’m just throwing out ideas…this would be something for much later) a way to alter the view of the timeline…like perhaps being able to view it in a vertical format, thus leaving more room to have thumbnail previews of all the content on each milestone down the length of the page. In this view, I don’t think it would be an issue to need to scroll down.
So…just as an easily seen list,
Labels of at least the years on the timeline itself, so you can just look at the line and know at least what years you’re going to be stopping at along the way
An offering of different views of the chart, a vertical orientation offering thumbnail previews of the milestones, for example
Perhaps a separate resources page, offering an easy to read list of all the resources used, as well as other places to get more info…like a “footnotes” section as well as a “see also” section. (Of course making as many of them hyperlinks as possible)
Also I’m not sure what resources you’ve been using from Mises.org, but here’s a few you might find useful:
Housing Bubble: Myth or Reality? - Frank Shostak (2003)
US Real Estate Bubble Nears End — Mises Economics Blog (2003)
Housing: Too Good to be True - Mark Thornton (2004)
The Housing Bubble in 4 Easy Steps - Mark Thornton
Did the Fed Cause the Housing Bubble? - Robert P. Murphy
1819: America’s First Housing Bubble - C.J. Maloney
Evidence that the Fed Caused the Housing Boom - Robert P. Murphy
Of course you can easily find many others by doing a search on the main page for “housing bubble articles”
Just an idea, you might want to inflation adjust the $ billions, since you make actual lending seem to grow faster than it has otherwise