Second p0st

I wonder how bzero should import blogs written in different timezones. bzero works like Radio - it stores the date of a post in the URL. However, that date is local time, not GMT or anyone else's time zone.

What that means is that when I make a post at 10am on 1 Jan 2003 local time (2003-01-01 10:00:00), the date part of its URL is /2003/1/1/, while the RSS pubDate is something like 2002-12-31 21:00:00 GMT. It messes up permalinks (and the flow of posts) if you import this somewhere else with a URL containing /2002/12/31/, but that's the best I can do without a hint as to the timezone of the original blogger.

The January backup for Second p0st shows exactly this problem (scroll down to the bottom).

Is there a standard tag (something from Dublin Core?) that I can use in my RSS <channel> section to specify the timezone of the creator? That would let me work out what the original permalinks should have been. Comments?

Notes:

Here is some mailing list discussion on the topic.

The RDF people refer to things specifically with timezone files (here are some more). That seems unnecessarily complex though.

bzero 0.15 is now available.

The main change is that you can now specify post titles, etc, in a new way:

    %title Foobar

rather than:

    #title 'Foobar'

If you use the old way, everything after "#title" is evaluated as a Python expression. This means you can do some cool stuff. However, it makes writing with non-US characters rather hard. If you use the new '%title' syntax, you can put anything in there (anything encoded in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 should work).

If you want to add yourself to the GeoURL project, you can now do so by editing a file ~/.bzero/(blogname)/extraheaders.html and putting in the <meta name="ICBM" content="lat, long"> line. The default template now includes the other required meta (DC.title). Details for how to do it.

There have also been a few bug fixes (things now say '2003' instead of '2002', and the BlogGazer code that reads a backed-up Radio or bzero weblog is partly integrated. (Try 'bzero import blogname http://url/to/files.xml' - details in the readme). It has difficulty with non-GMT time zones (it puts some of my Dec 31 posts in January) right now so I don't recommend using it just yet.

Enjoy!