Making time zones easier

[Sk3ptik0n]

I recently discovered that (at least in Chrome) if I select the time zone, say:

19:00 GMT

and r-click >> Select "search Google for xxxxxx", google is kind enough to show me something like this at the top of the page:

7:00 PM Sunday, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is
11:00 AM Sunday, in Sacramento, CA

Below I parsed the URL from google for the search and I got rid of a lot of gibberish. After that, I generated this search URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=22:00+GMT

This part:

https://www.google.com/search?q=

is self explanatory, 22:00+GMT was originally written "22%3A00" but when I substituted %3A with a colon it still worked. As it did when I eliminated the + before GMT. It tells me that maybe all it would take would be to have some sort of "search and replace" script to make this work. It would not change the time on the site, but would give the time in one click.

20:00 GMT

Click on the above and see if google transposes it for your own time zone. Obviously, google has to be aware of your own time zone. I am not sure if it does or not for those that are not logged in.

I know that organizing races is already a huge PITA, but this is pretty simple. In fact, it would probably not be too hard to script this somehow. In the frameworks I am familiar with, it would be really easy to automate the process , from using a snippet repository to an automated search and replace.

Anyway, for those that have been consulting charts or mentally adding or subtracting, using google is a lot faster and it automatically compensate for the messy times when everyone switches at different times.

 

[Jimlaad43]

Nice find!

 

[Frank]

Even easier!
http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/gmt-this-is-how-to-track-it-the-easiest-way.90144/

Alltho the adding in the page isn't added like that, but for personal use it is perfect .

 

[Sk3ptik0n]

Even easier!
http://www.racedepartment.com/threads/gmt-this-is-how-to-track-it-the-easiest-way.90144/

Alltho the adding in the page isn't added like that, but for personal use it is perfect .

I have actually been using that system for a while. In Chrome I have an even more convenient time some calculator right in the browser. SOmehow I still messed up in calculating race time for future events.

Assuming I haven't missed anything in the post you link to, using the various world clocks still show you the time right now, not a week from now at 22:00 UTC, so if you are trying to calculate this in Nepal at 3:00am local time, you still have to burn some neurons trying to figure out when the race will take place a week from now in GMT. There are also some areas where it's easy to mess up and either go race a day ahead or a day later (I don't remember which, maybe both).

Really, the idea would be to have a simple script running on the site that calculates a time zone (as long as it's written down with a standard format) based on the member's profile. Race2play.com has such a script and it works really good (although, when I joined I forgot to set my time zone and I was pissed that all the races seemed to be going on at 4am my time).

So my ideal would be to have the race times customized for every member based on the stated time zone. But those that set the schedules for the races, could easily make them into a link as I explained above so that members only have to click on the link and get the exact time of the race in their browser. With a bit of coding, this could be a simple tooltip if not a custom time.