G & J away from home

Friday, 15 July 2016

The International Date Line

There was no Friday the 15th thanks to the International Date Line, here illustrated by a snip from 'Exploring Our Fluid Earth,' College of Education, University of Hawai�i,:

Left: What it should look like -- Right: What it does look like

The Quirkiness of Blogger

As I move around the world I change the time zone settings on the blog so that I can post for the day I'm in - not the date in New Zealand.  Each time I do this, though, Blogger recalculates all the dates on my posts and changes them to what they would have been in the new time zone.  This makes for a very messy blog by the time I get home so I now hide the blog-generated date (I made the text white on a white background) and type the date as the first line of my entry.  This means the visible date of the post never changes, regardless of the time zone adjustments.

However, the change in time zones often puts two posts together in one panel - ideally each post would have its own panel, regardless, but Blogger puts all posts posted on the same day in one panel, divided by horizontal lines.  When two posts end up in the same panel I prefer to have the latter one second on the panel so within the panel it can be read in chronological order (earliest first, latest second) even though the blog in general doesn't work that way.

Anyway, once at home and the blog is back on the New Zealand time zone there's a bit of fancy footwork to get all the posts to sit in the order I prefer.  Posts don't disappear, they just dance around a bit for a while.

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