I've been trying to create an online timeline for another class and have trial-and-erred my way through a bunch of the tools available on the Web for this. Sharing my subjective findings here in case it's helpful to anyone down the line...

Dipity is very cool looking but is only for very recent events. Not so hot for an early 20th century novel.

The read/write/think timeline maker is NOT RECOMMENDED. It's intuitive and easy to use BUT YOU CANNOT SAVE YOUR WORK ANYWHERE. If you are just looking to make and print a timeline, this is great. Otherwise, extremely frustrating.

I thought this Simile widget tool was going to be the answer. I have no doubts it can make a great, media rich timeline. It uses Google docs as the base where you input data and then you write some html code with a tutorial...I'll be honest--I just wasn't up to the challenge and this ended up being a large time-flush.

So I did find one that looks pretty promising, here. It's easy to use and lets you imbed clickable media on your timeline. I think the finished result will be functional but kind of dorky looking.

The hardest part of the process with some of these timeline tools is figuring out how to get the files hosted on a server. If you don't know about FTP and index files, you are in for hard times or some study. Luckily, a buddy of mine is offering his assistance so I'm sidestepping this issue for the most part.

Here is the link to my timeline if anyone's inclined to check it out.