Comments on: Don’t let readers down, answer these five questions

By: Chipping the web - ‘0′ -- Chip’s Quips

Chipping the web - ‘0′ -- Chip’s Quips — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:54:44 +0000

[…] TDavid on writing good content. Writing may be one of the 3 R’s, but it’s all about the 5 W’s. […]

By: Being off by hours, Wordpress timezone change impact on archived posts and comments » Make You Go Hmm

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:29:21 +0000

[…] I’m not the first person using Wordpress who wanted to change the timezone midstream that had this happen, at least Sterling is in the club too. Did everybody else not care if the times on their posts and comments were off by hours? Maybe I shouldn’t care either. The future posts and comments will show correctly now so it’s only the past that’s off — by three hours. But according to current stats that is nearly 9,000 comments and over 4,000 posts that are off. […]

By: TDavid

TDavid — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:20:52 +0000

Yeah, I’m still poking around. Just made another post about the issue to highlight and see if others have noticed and what they did. It will be published shortly — in the correct timezone

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 00:18:19 +0000

I had the same problem. A while ago I switched the time to PST and started getting mixed comments. I probably don’t get as many comments as you do, so I just let it ride. Only one user asked about the phenomenon, and after I explained what happened he was fine with that.

But that sounds like a great idea for a WordPress plugin. Change the timezone and timestamp on all existing posts and comments. You would think WordPress would store the timestamp in UTC and convert on get_time().

Heh, none of my posts had timestamps, so I added that. My comment timestamps had a little “e” after them, even though they were pacific time, so I changed that “e” to “pst”. Thanks for bringing up the subject.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:17:39 +0000

Oh, and I manually fixed the timestamps for the comments in this post, so by the time you got here you might not have seen the order problem. If you look at say the hmmcasts which have been published at 4:20pm PST every day they all say 7:20 PST now which is technically wrong.

I suppose I could throw together some code to cycle through every post and comment roll back the time by three hours … lol. That’s a bug in Wordpress that it lets you change the timezone so easily but doesn’t actually change the data … I wonder if it’s been fixed in 2.1.0.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:15:02 +0000

Actually, no, not really, all the old timestamps don’t get changed so technically all 4,000 posts are off by three hours. I’ll have to poke around and see if anybody has already whipped up some code to change all the timestamps … or just live with the past being off by three hours.

I suppose not the end of the world being off by three hours until now. What do you think, Sterling?

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:12:33 +0000

Looks like everything’s still in order.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:08:14 +0000

Which means … some comments like this one will now appear out of order

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:07:14 +0000

All templates updated to reflect PST.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:03:10 +0000

Good point, it is on all updates though. Have to adjust the timezone anyway and move from EST (current) to PST out here, so will fix that in the templates.

UPDATE 3:11pm PST: edited the timestamp manually to PST.