Global Moxie

Photo by The Rocketeer.

A friendly reminder to Big Medium customers in the US, where daylight-saving time (DST) just started: Don't forget to turn your Big Medium clock ahead, too.

To change the time in Big Medium 2, update the "Time Zone Offset" setting in the "Settings>Site Properties" screen.

Big Medium lets you set the local time for your site, but it doesn't keep track of the start and stop of DST for you. Early on, I took a stab at trying to manage DST behind the scenes, but quickly discovered that the DST system is more complicated than a Florida electoral ballot.

It doesn't seem complicated, does it? Just set the time ahead on the correct springtime day, then set it back on its autumn counterpart. Heck, we all manage to do it ourselves, how hard can it be to get a computer to do it?

Inconsistency is the headache here. Some countries observe daylight-saving time, and others don't. Most near the equator, for example, don't bother. Neither do China or Japan.

Even within individual nations, clocks don't follow the same rules. Several US territories don't observe the time switch, and two states are nay-sayers, too: Hawaii doesn't have daylight-saving time, and neither does Arizona... except for the portion within the Navajo Nation, which does observe daylight savings time.

Canada and Australia are similarly half in, half out. In Canada, most of Saskatchewan and parts of northeastern British Columbia stay on standard time all year. Down under, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia also bow out of daylight saving (effectively creating both horizontal and vertical time zones in Australia during summer months).

Even the time change isn't always the same. Among countries that do change their clocks, most shift an hour, but some places shift just half an hour.

You get the idea. Sorting out daylight-saving time around the world is crazy complicated. And, as the US and portions of Canada have seen this year, all of this is subject to change at lawmakers' discretion. Most of Indiana's counties joined DST just last year, for example. Mexico started just a decade ago. The system is fluid.

The programmer's headache is assembling all of this information to translate geographic location and national policies into a date when the time should change, if at all. In truth, there are databases that keep track of such things. That's how your PC's computer changes the time automatically, and your server is smart enough to do the same.

Thing is, different operating systems use different databases and store the info in different places. While it's relatively easy to hook up to these systems when you're writing code for a specific platform (or, even better, a specific server), it's trickier when you write code, like Big Medium, that's intended to run on all kinds of different server systems.

While built-in code libraries make it easy to get the true local time where the server is located, that's often not the local time for the site they serve; figuring out the time zone of another location is tougher going. It's certainly possible to do, but I quickly decided that it wasn't worth the time, at least for now.

In the end, that means that Big Medium is a little bit like your bedside alarm clock. You've gotta remember to change the time yourself.

Tags: bigmedium, programming, time, timezones