Progress and snags

I've been instructed to hold off on the wiki until I can get the timeline up and running. That's what I've spent the last week doing. First I took 14 separate timelines that the company had created, mostly in MS Word, and concatenated them into one master timeline in an Excel file. After cleaning it up and creating some master categories for each entry in the timeline, I used an open-source program from Simile (Simile Timeline) to create a basic structure for the timeline.

This timeline is a dynamic, web-based tool, that allows users to scroll through dates, and click on different points to reveal information. An example of one such timeline is here.

The timeline was to have five major bands, one for each of the categories I created. Each of those was to scroll in tandem with the other four. Each point on the timeline reveals more information with a mouse click; most have links to other documents.

Building the XML files to fill in the information was easy. The more difficult work involved ensuring the data was only available on the firm's local network, so that people outside the company couldn't access it. Also problematic has been fixing little details (ether colors, label sizes, etc.) for the client. It's an ongoing process. At present it looks to be 90% finished, but as is said, once you're 90% finished, you're halfway done.

The snag referenced in the title refers to the wiki itself. Now that it has become clear to both client and myself alike, it is apparent that using PBWorks to host the wiki is unacceptable. The client needs the entire wiki to be hosted from the local network, so I'm beginning a new search to find a better alternative.