The clocks changed overnight and we’re now officially in summertime. Where I am, in the Central European Time zone (CET), it’s now GMT +2.
In my home, I have a lot of clocks (about 12 at the last count including the VCR, the oven and the microwave). Except for two of them, that means manually changing the time. The two I mentioned are electronic with a radio connection to an atomic clock somewhere in Europe (in Germany, I think) and which automatically change the time at the right moment.
So it is with my computer running Windows XP. When I turned it on this morning, it had automatically changed the time. So everything I do on this PC that needs a date/time setting in it, from saving a file with the correct attributes to writing an email, autoamtically has the correct information.
Why can’t my blog platform, WordPress, do the same? When I logged into the admin for this blog, I had to remember to manually change the time:
If my computer can do it by itself, why not the blog platform? It must call the correct UTC time from somewhere. You would think that simple intelligence like this could be within the platform.
This is not a rant, by the way, just a muse…
5 responses to “Time-changing should be automatic”
Well, is it really that simple? Unfortunately I don’t think it is:
Some countries use Daylight Saving Time, some don’t (even within the same time zone). Europe changed the clocks this summer, while the US won’t change until next weekend. As far as I know not all states in the US use Daylight savings time and even within some of the states some of the reservations don’t use it (at least that’s how it was 13 years ago, not sure if that’s still the case).
That looks like a fairly complex database (or mechanism to look it up somewhere) to me.
And no, I’m not looking forward to the teleconferences with the US next week where half of the participants will call in too early and the other half too late…
I thought it might not be as simple as I wish it would be, Armin, otherwise it would already be happening, right?
Nevertheless, it ought to be possible to have an automatic setting somewhere when you configure your blog platform. So if you’re in a place where the time doesn’t change, then you’d make that setting.
It would certainly also be helpful if everywhere that does change the time, changed it at the same time…
Neville,
You should be in Australia… Thanks to the Commonwealth games (Olympics for the Uk Commonwealth) being held here, the Government decided to push daylight saving change back a week. Simple in theory, but now we have a whole week of time confusion, rather than just one day…
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