I have toyed for a while with the idea of building a timeline of life events, but have never figured out how I want to attack it. This would contain events like vacations, where I worked, various kid milestones, etc. that would seem to be fun to look back on many years down the road.

A couple months ago I built out a rudimentary Excel spreadsheet, and it kind of gets the job done, but it's very manual. As time goes on, I have to "extend" the currently ongoing items, add new months / years, etc.

My buddy Intern suggested Flickr, and using their timeline in the Organizr, but that's heavily based on the date taken data of uploaded pictures - I'm not sure I will always have at least one pic for every milestone / event I want to track. (I could create a bogus placeholder I guess).

Poking around the web - I ran into Drupal. Check out this timeline. Timeline | drupal.org
Bummer is, the Drupal environment that it runs on is a PHP / MySQL world, so I don't know one thing about getting that up and running. Intern will have to help me there.

Another alternative is to write one myself as a pet project in WPF. Maybe throw some LINQ in there - just for good measure. :)

Update (07/29/07): Here is another timeline tool from xtimeline (thanks LifeHacker for the tip). Looks like it's an online tool, with free subscription. So far I think I like the drupal version a little better, since it's under my control (after I hijack the .js files of course) :)

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