Time on homepage to match user time?

March 6, 2001 9:15 PM

a minor request: could the time on the home page be user-relative?

i have the annoying habit of taking every timestamp i see at face value, and i'm not in PST, so it creates a little hiccup in my brain.
posted by o2b to Feature Requests at 9:15 PM (7 comments total)

that's especially true when you live in GMT +10
posted by lagado at 11:57 PM on March 6, 2001

It's by no means an easy task, and that's why I've put it off for ages. Maybe, someday, I'll add this feature. I know it makes sense and I should have done it from the start, but it would require a lot of changes to get right.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:13 AM on March 7, 2001

A kind of halfway house would be to show the current time in PST somewhere on the site.
It would give a reference point for those of us in countries other than the US. You 'muricans confuse those of us with only one time zone with yer multiple zonery hijinks.
posted by Markb at 2:48 AM on March 9, 2001

Markb, the current time is shown on each and every page of MetaFilter, in the little greenish-yellow bar.

Look up there....see?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:02 PM on March 14, 2001

Oh dear, over a year as a member, visiting nearly every day and I never noticed. The shame.
Isn't it early in PST land at the moment.....
posted by Markb at 2:34 AM on March 16, 2001

Matt, couldn't this be achieved by using cookies on the browsers machine, set through preferences? Then for your date calc, all you do is subtract or add the cookie value... ??????
posted by fooljay at 11:33 AM on April 21, 2001

Of course, laptops would screw that up, but they can simply reset the value in prefs if they go to a new timezone...
posted by fooljay at 11:34 AM on April 21, 2001