Adding a world clock to your blog

Quite some time ago I’ve written a post about how to create a clock which shows the blog author’s time zone. The intention was to make relative temporal references (like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, “within the last hour”, etc) more relevant to readers from different timezones. While the method worked perfectly, it did require you to have a place to host PHP files (it also took quite some time for me to get the timezone diffing code right, but that’s an other issue).

Recently I found a simpler (read: somebody else does the hosting for me :-)) solution to the problem thanks to the securitygarden blog: WorldTimeServer.

To get the clock, you have to do the following (it is a little non-intuitive, but bear with me):

• Go to their Current Local Times around the world page and select the location on the right you would like the clock to show. Your selection is saved in a cookie
• Now go back to the front page and select “Get free, cool and customizable analog clocks to embed on your web pages or blog site”. From here you can select if you would like a 12H or 24H clock and customize the colors.

While this solution is not as powerful as my original suggestion (one particular missing feature is that it doesn’t convert in-line dates as the original one did – but I didn’t use that feature as much as I originally imagined anyway), but it is much simpler (and doesn’t oblige me to keep up a PHP hosting service).

Enjoy your time! :-)

Picture taken from Robbie-73's photostream with permission.