January 19, 2004
What Time Is It?
Why is it that whenever websites display the time, they show the time retrieved from MY computer? What’s the point in that? I’m not sure about Macs, but on Windows PCs the time is displayed in that handy little clock at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen (and it’s generally displayed in the more common Linux windows managers too!) If you HAVE to put the time on your site, wouldn’t it be just a little bit MORE useful to at least display the time at YOUR timezone? At least then I’ll know if I can message/email you and there’s a chance that you’ll be awake!
Seriously, simply grabbing the visitors time and displaying it on your site via Javascript has got to be one of the more pointless things that you can have on your site. I’m not sure how complicated it would be to do in Javascript, but a server-side method would provide a relatively simple way of giving you something at least vaguely more useful:
- Get the time from your webserver (
$servertime) - If your home/business location is not in the same timezone as your webserver, calculate the time where you are (
$yourtime=$servertime +/- however_many_hours) - Display
$yourtime
NOW, you, me, and Flavor Flav know what time it is!
