Planaroo is designed to be... as the saying goes... as simple as possible, but not simpler.
In theory that sounds just grand, but in practice it means making a lot of decisions for users instead of letting them set preferences in control panels.
Time zones are a good example. Users will soon be able to leave reviews (or rooviews, in our case) for attractions, and read reviews written by other users. A review's creation date and time will be displayed with the review content because older reviews may be less relevant. Date is clearly a lot more important than time in this use case, but I'll include it anyway because it explains the default sort order. But which time zone to use? There are a lot to choose from. The US has four huge time zones and several smaller ones.
Soon after I started working at eBay back in 2002, I noticed that all times listed on the US site were based on Pacific Time. I suppose the decision was made early on in eBay's history because the company was founded in San Jose, California, which is in the Pacific zone. But there are far more people living in the Eastern and Central time zones in the US. Logically the decision doesn't seem to make sense, but I secretly liked the idea of eBay Official Time being Pacific. It seemed like a tiny bit of rebellion against the East Coast and The Mother of All Time Zones, Eastern Time. But honestly I have no idea if Pierre Omidyar was being practical, logical, or if it was simply a decision made in the middle of the night (Pacific Time, of course) back in the mid-1990s by some early eBay programmer who is probably now on his private island completely unconcerned with time zones -- or watches for that matter.
Anyway... back to Rails. Starting in Rails 2.1 we can easily set the application's time zone to be whatever we want it to be. In the database everything is stored as UTC by default, but the front end will do the math necessary to show it in the selected time zone. Formatting time in Rails is a breeze, too.
Which leaves two options:
- Declare a time zone for all the land
- Let users set their time zone in a preference
For now I'm going to use Pacific Time for the site. Maybe I'll change it later to another time zone or perhaps it will make sense to let users set their own at some point. But for now the official Planaroo time is Pacific Time, which is where Planaroo is located.
All hail Pacific Time.
