Time Stamped

So I’m having a couple of odd problems here at the blog …

I have two different widgets that post content here from elsewhere.  One is the WordPress “Twitter Tools” plugin, which will post a daily digest of my various Tweets.  The other is Digest Post for Google Reader, which generates the Unblogged Bits from my Google Reader shares.

Here’s part of the problem: my blog sits in the Mountain time zone (GMT-7, or GMT-6 during Daylight Saving Time).  My blog’s servers sit in Eastern time (GMT-5/4).

For some functions, WordPress pays attention to local time (there’s a setting for it an everything).  For some functions, though, it looks at the server time.  This sometimes causes a bit of hilarity, e.g., at the beginning of August my Twitter Tools digest would close itself off at 9:30pm MDT (when I told it to), but would queue the post to publish at 11:30pm MDT (because 9:30pm MDT = 11:30pm EDT, where the server is).  If I wanted a Twitter digest for the day, that’s as close as I could do it, and any Tweets I made after 9:30 wouldn’t show up until the following night.

Notice I said, “at the beginning of August.”  As far as I can tell, as of 7 August, something changed on the server end of things, so that now the server time reflects GMT (or UTC).  Which means it’s 6 hours off at the moment here in Denver.  So Twitter Tools cuts off the nightly Twitter digest at 9:30pm MDT as instructed, but sets up the post to fire off at 3:00am MDT the following day, 6 hours later, complete with the next day’s date stamp.

This is irksome.

I have an inquiry in at the Twitter Tools support forum to see if there’s a way to fix this (the system should look at the time that WordPress recognizes, not what the server says).  I seem to also recall there’s a way to tweak a PHP module to use a particular time zone.  And I need to poke on the WordPress site to see if there’s a way recommended there to resolve this.

In the meantime, sorry if it sometimes seems like things have egregiously offset time or datestamps.  It’s not my intent. Really.  I seem to have come unstuck in time …