Hrm.
So I got a note from BD asking why the timestamps on my “Blog of Heroes” comments list in the sidebar is off by 2 hours (i.e., the timestamps show up as +2 hours vs MDT).
That is odd. (And, in fact, it’s true for all the timestamps over there.)
The feeds over there are, as the little icon suggests, RSS feeds. (Back in the MT days I had my blogs creating SSI include files for that purpose, but RSS is much more elegant, to mention much easier). I’m using the KB Advanced RSS Widget to display them, because of the flexibility. It, in turn, uses MagpieRSS to read in and parse the feeds.
Interestingly, you can look at the feeds the blog is reading (if you’re logged into your blog with site admin rights, and are using that plugin) by going to yourblogURL?kbrss=feedURL, e.g.,
https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/?kbrss=https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/heroes/comments/feed/
What’s interesting about it is that this entry:
Comment on CO: We Got Characters! by Dave – 20-Aug-09 12:10pm
Has a publish date (which is the field being used) of:
[pubdate] => Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:10:50 +0000
Now, my blog is set (verified) to UTC-6, since I’m on Mountain Daylight Time. So you’d think that that would give a date of 10:10:50.
Hmmmm. But my blog’s servers are (I believe) on EDT, which is UTC-4 … which would translate into 12:10 quite nicely.
(As a side note, the feeds only update in the blog once an hour (to keep them from having to update every time the page gets refreshed). So a comment on Blog of Heroes (or, for that matter, a post) will not update here instantaneously.)
I poked around in the widget documentation, and that led me over to the PHP formats for the date. I tested a couple of the time zone parameters — and, hey presto, it showed up as EDT, which makes me think that it’s adjusting the raw feed based on server time zone, not on blog time zone.
I have an inquiry out to the widget developer to confirm my understanding, and to find out if there’s a way around that. In the meantime, I’m including the time zone with the feed listings so that it’s clearer what’s involved. I’m still living in MDT, but my feeds belong to EDT …
Not long ago I had a person I know suggest that time zones were really just a bother and that we should return the US to one time zone. They thought that it didn’t really matter what time 8am was as long as we all were agreed, that since time was a human construct we could adjust to one time zone. I thought about that for a while and decided that the possibility for wackiness seemed high. Even reasonable people can have crazy ideas.
It’s not all that crazy of a thought. Some time zones extend way out of their “band,” and we deal with odd shifting of day and night with Daylight Saving Time every year. There would be certain conveniences with everyone starting and stopping the 8-5 workday at the same time nationwide. (Certain inconveniences, too.). I imagine life would be a lot easier if you live on a time zone border right now, too.
Not likely to happen, mind you.