Comments on: Daylight Saving and MovableType

By: stepan

stepan — Fri, 09 May 2003 23:22:45 +0000

MovableType stores timestamps in local time (adjusted by the user specified TZ offset and the server’s DST offset, if in effect), but it does not store this (cumulative) offset in the database. Figuring out what the current “correct DST” is, will finally always show the correct local time (from the blog author’s point of view). However this will not, by itself, solve the problem of the current GMT time of the post (which, for example, is used in RSS feeds).
Right now, the RSS feed uses the BlogTimeZone, which is wrong half of the year. I could write a plugin that shows an entry’s TimeZone – adjusted for DST if it was in effect when the entry was posted – and have a solution of this, right?
Not neccessarily. If I move to another place and adjust the timezone on my blog accordingly I run into another problem. When I rebuild my blog, the time offset info for all my old entries now becomes incorrect.
A complete solution would require to store the time offset currently in effect with each (local) time stamp in the database.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 19:03:04 +0000

Sorry Yoz – for some reason I remembered that as Tim’s idea.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 04:14:47 +0000

Jim: well, in a way it was my idea, but I got the idea while looking at a Finder window on a Mac – MacOS shows file dates as relative (Today, Yesterday, etc) which is dead handy.
She: damn straight!
Yoz: Your email field doesn’t accept ‘armoured’ email addresses – sort it out!

By: She

She — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 05:05:44 +0000

Yes, my entries are definitely two hours behind, so I have to change the clock manually before I post.
Which is rather annoying, actually.
(Didn’t we already say that you should have an horizontal rule or something in between your comments? *Where* is it?)

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 21:59:46 +0000

I’m surprised more people don’t use the technique we use on h2g2 (Tim’s idea, IIRC) and show all the recent dates as relative (posted 4 hours ago). Saves all that tedious mucking about in UTC.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 19:23:04 +0000

“MT acknowledges this by allowing timezone configuration on a per-blog basis. Here’s the drop-down in question:
[DROP-DOWN]
One of the neat things there is that it doesn’t make the usual mistaken assumption that timezones are uniform longitudinal slices that are always a whole number of hours apart. Yes, you really do get half-hour differences.”
They seem though to have forgotten about Nepal (UTC + 5h45m) – don’t ask me why …

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 18:32:40 +0000

Good point. On some weblogs I’d prefer to keep all times as UTC, as it means readers don’t need to know what country I’m in. But if MT always adjusts things automatically there’s no way of me doing that reliably.