Future Posts - 6 comments

I've had to take steps to prevent B4L-syndicated blog posts from hogging the top three places because they've been published with a date that is many hours in the future. I'm not rapping knuckles, but it is kinda annoying...

The B4L software really shouldn't be doing this: it knows the post's date is wrong, but has no authoritative way of knowing what it should be. Generally, the problem is caused by the blog's author writing in Britain under the rule of GMT, but publishing under some US time zone (generally PST), which their blogging software appears to achieve by blindly adding 8 hours on to local time (NB. If we had any California-based bloggers, they'd be quite right to use PST). However, we have absolutely no way of knowing what the blogger's time zone is. We might intercept something set 5 hours in the future, which could either be a brand new post published under a Central Asian timezone (unlikely) or something published under PST, which the blogger worked on for 2 and a half hours and which didn't actually reach their Atom/RSS file for another half an hour.

The right course of action is for bloggers to check/update their publishing settings, but in the meantime we'll use a couple of new (much better, but still imperfect) rules to make things better:

• If we encounter anything set more than 3 hours in the future, we'll assume the blogger is publishing in Blogger-default PST, and we will subtract a full 8 hours.
• Anything less than that, we'll shift it back by enough hours to make it either now, or in the past.

Hopefully that'll do the trick (it seems to be working now) without causing problems for anyone who is posting in the correct time zone.