Coming Soon: An Updated Illustrated History of the NHL

As time permitted, work had been going into adding rollovers to the Illustrated History of the NHL infographic. The rollovers give info on what happened at each entry on the timeline. Keep an eye out: the hope was to launch the update the following week.

What a rollover adds

A timeline of every franchise in league history already does one job well: it shows how the names connect. What it cannot show in a single line is why a name changed, or what happened in the year a team appeared or vanished. The rollovers were built to carry that second layer, so a reader could hover over an entry and get the story instead of guessing at it.

An update, not a replacement

Until the new version was ready, readers were told they could always check out the current one, which the post still described as cool. That is the right way to ship a labour of love: the old chart stays up while the new one is finished, and nobody is asked to wait for a promise.

It shipped

An update was appended to the post when the work was done: the new interactive infographic is live, enjoy, visit now. What had been a static image became something a reader could interrogate, and the archive gained a reference tool rather than a picture.

Why the small posts matter

This is a three sentence entry, and it is worth keeping for the same reason the infographic is. It records the work in progress, the decision to add interactivity, and the fact that the whole thing was built in whatever spare time a working writer had. The chart did not appear fully formed; it was improved in public.