Facebook, myspace, MSN, craigslist; all detect timezone and show times and dates correctly without ever submitting a form or reloading a page.
How do they do it? I have a pretty large site and have people publishing articles which need to display correct times (uploaded 3pm or 6pm depending on timezone).
Preloaders? Javascript? Loading the page and reloading it? My site currently has the person enter the site and upon first entry it reloads the page with updated information of their timezone through javascript. This is however a pretty annoying thing and am looking for another alternative. I know that upon loading I can send out an ajax request and then have it update everything throughout the site with the correct timezone for the user BUT if I have to click back, or reload it asks if I’d like to send the information again which is also bad. So how do they do it?
I was playing around with Facebook, changing my location on my local machine and it seemed to update the timezone every 5 minutes or so.
I am php, zend-framework based.
there is no “timezone” request header, or something like that, so, you can’t with php
but with javascript you can get the timezone offset of the client, then you could make a xmlhttp request to send informations to php
see this: http://www.pageloom.com/automatic-timezone-detection-with-javascript
pretty easy!
hope this helps