Unless you live in a country where the clocks never change (there are a lot of places like that as indicated by the countries and territories in red and the orange in Wikipedia’s world daylight saving time map above), you’ll have done what everyone in Europe and many other places did last night – advance your clocks one hour to account for summer time.
Here in the UK, we’re now on daylight saving time (DST) – British Summer Time (BST) as we know it – that remains in force until October 25 when we revert to GMT for the winter.
So it’s time for my bi-annual whinge about changing the clocks.
In our house, we have a lot of them. Some are old-fashioned analogue clocks that you need to wind by hand to keep them going, and manually change the time when needed.
Luckily, most of the clocks – including the all-important bedside alarm clock – are linked to a radio transmitter in Cumbria which automatically changes the time to and from BST via a radio signal.
Why can’t my blog do something like that? Not by a radio signal but just automatically change the time on the server where its hosted (better still, give me a choice to set up in advance how I want the blog to auto-deal with time changes)?
It can’t, so I had to remember to log in to WordPress and manually change the time zone setting.
That’s just this blog: I have six others I’m involved with that I need to do the same thing with.
You would think that something so simple could be automated already.
If my simple little radio-controlled bedside alarm clock can do this, why not my DreamHost-hosted WordPress blog?
Maybe the real question to ask is why on earth do we still need to change our clocks at all. After all, more than half the world’s countries don’t – including well over 30 who used to and no longer do – and they seem to get on just fine.
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9 responses to “Is there a point in changing the clocks?”
Hobson: Is there a point in changing the clocks?:
Unless you live in a country where the clocks never ch.. http://tinyurl.com/dl7qet
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[Blog] Is there a point in changing the clocks? [link to post]
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I take your point. In 2008, no-one should have to manually remember to tell modern software what the correct time is.
I use Habari for 3 blogs and because Habari understand what time zone I live in as opposed to what UTC offset I love in, Habari just gets it right.
In 2009, you mean. :)
So if Habari can do it, why not other platforms?
[Blog] Is there a point in changing the clocks? http://tinyurl.com/d33hll
Hobson: Is there a point in changing the clocks?:
Unless you live in a country where the clocks never ch.. http://tinyurl.com/dl7qet
Because Habari uses PHP 5’s timezone support (via the object-oriented DateTime class), and most other blog software (like WordPress) is still even now listening to make sure that the death rattle of PHP 4, with its dependence on procedural code and no timezone support, wasn’t just a a bad cough.
Thanks for that explanation, Owen. You would think it couldn’t be too difficult to build something in to WordPress to handle that PHP difference.
Actually, thanks to a tip from Bruno Amaral, I can see that someone has: Automatic Timezone plugin for WordPress.
Wish I’d known about that last week!
do you have any relevant information which need to be posted with that hour setting correct? I do not even bother with setting my dreamhost blog to the european timezone, let alone switch it to summer time! :)