Searching for new timeline tool, using real dates?

[Daniel J. Lewis]

Our Once Upon a Time fairytale land timeline is quite popular. Huge thanks to Abigail for helping us update it.

But lets be honest about something. The timeline is horrendous. Bullet points worked early on, but now the timeline is a lot more complicated.

So I’m looking for something new, and here are my requirements.

• Must be embeddable on our own website.
• Must cost no more than $5/month or $100 to purchase (I’m flexible on this).
• Must not use Flash player.
• Must be mobile-friendly (including all interactivity on a mobile device).
• Must be accessible and Google-indexable (I want a screen reader to be able to understand it).
• Must be “responsive” (this basically means that it can resize with a browser window).
• Would be great if it allowed collaborators (so I can grant access to others to keep it updated).
• Should allow nonstandard dates, like 5, 10, 20, 50.

That last option is the hardest. So here’s where I want your feedback. How would you feel about a timeline with fake absolute dates? So we could just arbitrarily decide that the curse was enacted on July 4, 1500, and build back from there.

I don’t like using a real date for a fictional, dateless timeline. But it may be our only option to work with everything else, especially since a package I’m considering meets almost all of the other requirements except for the date.

What do you think?

[obisgirl]

I actually have a few timeline sites bookmarked:

http://www.capzles.com/
http://www.dipity.com/
http://www.tiki-toki.com/

[Daniel J. Lewis]

Thanks, Obisgirl. I’ve looked at those, too.

http://www.capzles.com/ is Flash-powered, so can’t use it.
http://www.dipity.com/ is among my top considerations, but they’re far to expensive for embedding an ad-free version.
http://www.tiki-toki.com/ requires end dates for everything, which is very frustrating.

[Phee]

Do you have to write the actual month out, or can you just have dates expressed like 00/00/00? And then sorta devise your own calendar of sorts and have each block of events happen in a certain “year” and if events happen near each other they can be in the same “month” but on different “days”? Not sure I’m making any sense or if it’d even work, so let’s see if this helps, taking the first block of events from the current timeline…

00/00/00 Rumpelstiltskin deserts during the Ogre Wars. Perhaps getting his limp-causing injury from this?

00/01/00 Rumpelstiltskin returns to a wife who doesn’t want to live with a coward and she leaves. Perhaps dying or being killed by Rumpelstiltskin while she tried to leave?

00/00/07 (to indicate a certain number of years have passed) A beggar offers to help Rumpelstiltskin, but he’s secretly the Dark One seeking escape from his curse.

01/00/07 Rumpelstiltskin invades the Duke’s castle to steal the dagger with Zoso’s name.

01/00/07 Rumpelstiltskin kills Zoso and takes his powers and becomes the new Dark One.

02/00/07 Rumpelstiltskin’s son, Baelfire, turns 14 and soldiers come to take him into the Ogre Wars, but Rumpelstiltskin defeats the soldiers with his new powers.

Like I said, I’m not even sure it makes sense enough to be a workable system, but figured I’d throw it out there, just in case.

Edited to add that with those dates I was going dd/mm/yy, just realised that’d confuse all you people over there who write the date the wrong way round. 😉 I guess it’d be written the American way round if you devised a system like that though.

[Daniel J. Lewis]

Yes, that’s what I’m thinking we’d have to do. But then again, creating fake dates could allow to better understand time. Like seeing how close are how far two items are from each other.

I just spoke with the developer of another timeline, but he won’t have his new version ready until July. That leaves one option left, which I have to test more.

[obisgirl]

@DanielJLewis wrote:

Thanks, Obisgirl. I’ve looked at those, too.

http://www.capzles.com/ is Flash-powered, so can’t use it.
http://www.dipity.com/ is among my top considerations, but they’re far to expensive for embedding an ad-free version.
http://www.tiki-toki.com/ requires end dates for everything, which is very frustrating.

I have a few other others bookmarked but I’m not sure how good they are. It was worth a shot 😀

[Daniel J. Lewis]

@obisgirl wrote:

I have a few other others bookmarked but I’m not sure how good they are. It was worth a shot 😀

I’m going back and saving the timelines I find in Delicious.

Here are the running mates:

http://timeline.verite.co—Free, embeddable, works on iPad, responsive, and can be populated from a Google Docs spreadsheet.

http://www.tiki-toki.com—$5/month, embeddable, works on iPad, responsive, can allow group editing with password, many display options, print option, and probably what I’ll try for now.

[Daniel J. Lewis]

I’m subscribing to Tiki-Toki for now. If anyone would like to help populate it, use “timelineeditor” as the secret word.

(I’m making this forum thread private to logged in members.)

[hjbau]

I really think what you should do is have BC as in Before Curse and those times can go back in descending order like Rumpel become the dark one 300 BC so around 300 years Before Curse. That is how i think of the world in my head. Emma’s birth, as the savior, is the pivot point of their history. So everything before her birth on the day the curse was enacted is BC descending order of years.

It does make it more difficult on how you do the timeline after her birth and the start of the curse because you would still want to keep the correct dates as our dating goes as in the Curse started in our world in 1981 or whatever year that was.

[hjbau]

Where do you go to look at the new timeline?

[Author]

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