Well, I’ve changed my timezone for the third time. First was “Daylight Savings Time” (or -8:00 hours). Second was “Pacific Standard Time” (or -7:00 hours). Third is UTC (or “Coordinated Universal Time“, the equivalent to “Greenwich Mean Time”):
UTC is the time standard used for many Internet and World Wide Web standards
Those who transmit on the amateur radio bands often log the time of their radio contacts in UTC, […]
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To change your WordPress.com “Timezone” or to “Choose a city in the same timezone as you”:
Go to >> Dashboard >> Settings >> General
I really don’t like to observe DST and should choose “Los Angeles”, which appears mid-way under the “Americas” section.
For the “Date Format,” I created a custom version to read as 20101107 (or Ymd).
For the “Time Format,” I created a custom version to read as 11:39:46 am (or H:i:s A T).
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While it’s supposed to be 3:41:46 am PST; the current timestamp for this particular weblog draft was at 11:41:46am UTC.
Already I can see problems with DST enabled forums. If there are multiple users entering from different time zones and the person forgets to manually offset their personal, user profile accordingly, then the post entries to forum threads would be, well, “off” by the hours of that user’s location.
But with the weblogs set to UTC, there is no second guessing the time entered for each blog posts, except for the location of the user! I hate that unnecessary detail and need control of when my precious thoughts were entered and at what time.
But WordPress.com “locks” the times according to the “General Settings”. Since I’ve used the “manual offsets” and changed those twice the “timestamps” are set first to DST and then later to PST. When I use the custom “Timezone abbreviation” – the capital letter “T”, that currently appears as UTC regardless of previous “manual offsets” saved via “General Settings” of this weblog.
I give up. No wonder most WordPress.com themes do NOT have timezomes as part of the meta data. It messes up the “true” time of when the blog was published! And frankly, noone seems to care, except moi!
So this post entry would be the first blog under the UTC format. Yuch.
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