I have this idea that if my photo albums are connected to my GPS tracks, then for the many thousands of photos I’ve got that don’t have locations I’ll be able to get likely locations based on their temporal proximity to others that do have known locations. No, hang on, that’s doable without the tracks even… but whatever, it’s still nice to have all in the same database because then I can get exact locations! Or something. (Possibly I just like stuffing around with code.)

I’m just excited to have Twyne working again, after spending most of this year feeling like it’s all too hard. The GPS/time thing that I am interested in getting working is the one where I can give a location to a post, and it’ll tell me what the local time is for the post. Because post times are all in UTC, but I want to display their times in whatever local timezone they were written in, it’s necessary to convert a combination of date/time and coordinates into a UTC offset. It seems that the easiest way to do that might be with Overpass, because timezone relations are all in OSM now. If I knew anything about what I’m talking about, there might well be an easier way. But I’m a programmer, not someone who knows stuff.

Wordpress’ handling of timezones has always annoyed me. It’s one of the reasons I now use my own blogging thing, which has all post times in UTC (but displayed in the viewer’s timezone). Same for photo times.

It gets even worse when posting while travelling. Don’t write while sitting at Sydney airport and then again just before arriving in San Francisco, and expect the posts to appear in that order. Very annoying if you’re a pedant.

A gentleman by the name of Eric emailed this comment:

Why do you always write your articles in the future?

I take it he’s in the Western Hemisphere. It’s not the future where I am, except when I steal Amelia Watson’s time-travelling watch. But I take the point; timezones are hard.

My blog here briefly showed both my localtime and UTC under each post. I got rid of the latter because I thought it made things more confusing. Maybe I need to go back to calling out my timezone to each post.

While I’m talking about these spherical anomalies of time and space, handing timezones was one of the last nails in the coffin of WordPress for me back in the day. I used to write from multiple places in The Before Times™ and when I was studying overseas. To this day, most of my posts from 2005-12 were filed with +08:00 for Singapore and KL, even though half the posts were from Adelaide or Sydney. That might not sound like much, but I also used to write late into the night. That discrepancy of a couple of hours was enough to push hundreds of posts into the wrong day. The horror!

It’s probably not worth sweating over having the exact time on a blog like this. But as my dad always said, a task worth doing is a task worth doing right. Then he hit his head on a kitchen cabinet.