METHODOLOGY

There are a lot of scripts and calculators and timeline tools going on here, so I thought there should be a place where I explain what I'm doing behind the screen and why I made certain choices.

There will be several sections to this, including how I do events, the quirks of each calculator, and the quirks of timelining. If you don't see a specific section, that's because I haven't made it yet :p.

For any of these methods, if you have a suggestion or correction, please let me know in the email below or the guestbook above! If your suggestion makes sense and I like it, I'll change my methods!

How do I do events?

Historical events can be very... difficult.

If you're lucky, there's a nice, undisputable, Gregorian date written in a log somewhere. Otherwise, welcome to the historian's nightmare. Dates can be recorded in histories centuries after an event happened. Sometimes there's no date recorded at all. Sometimes we have several dates proposed and no way of figuring out who's right. Sometimes we don't know what happened exactly. Sometimes you have a nice, clean date, but it was recorded before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and that is a whole bucket of headaches.

I've tried to research as much as I reasonably can (given the sheer number of events I want to record). If the date is not agreed-upon, I'll either give a likely date or a range of likely dates spread over a couple entries. If the date is agreed-upon, but non-Gregorian, I'll retroactively convert it into the Gregorian calendar, even if it didn't exist yet anywhere. This is because my calculators depend on accurate day differences between dates, and the Julian to Gregorian discrepancy grew pretty big by the 1200s and beyond.

So if you find that what I wrote for a date is off from historical consensus by between 1 and 11 days, it's likely that I've converted it to Gregorian time.