This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Adam Green.
Original Post: Working with a unified time
Feed Title: ruby.darwinianweb.com
Feed URL: http://www.nemesis-one.com/rss.xml
Feed Description: Adam Green's Ruby development site
I have most of the details worked out for the RubyRiver code, although there were some struggles along the way. Somebody is going to have to explain to me why a long list of method names and arguments with no other explanation is considered "documentation" by so many people. One decision I have to make is how to display the date and time for each post. Every post has a date and time in its RSS item, but they are all in the blogger's local time with UTC offsets. All the posts need to be sorted on the publication date and time when they are combined into a single feed, so I will be converting them to the same time zone before sorting. The question is whether I use this unified time on the RubyRiver page and in the merged RSS feed. It seems confusing to display a post with a UTC or EST value when the poster may be in California. On the other hand, displaying the original value from the RSS feed also is confusing, because all the posts will be in different time zones. I can see why so many aggregators punt and display "XX minutes ago." That gives a unified format without any confusion. This works on the web page, but isn't valid in the RSS feed. I'll probably put back the original pubDate string in the merged RSS feed, and leave it up to the user's RSS reader to make its own decisions about formatting.
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