Question

I’m using the jQuery Coundown plugin with Django to generate accurate and synced data for every view.

For syncing time that is displayed on all browsers, I use serverSync function of the plugin to pass the data (very similar to the example) like this:

function serverTime() { 
    var time;
    $.ajax({url: '/ajax/get-server-time/', 
        async: false, dataType: 'text', 
        success: function(text) { 
            time = new Date(text); 
        }, error: function(http, message, exc) { 
            time = new Date(); 
    }});
    return time;
}

And my countdown init selector function is as such (I add unixtime to data of the element for the endDatetime via Django):

function initAllTimers(selected){
    $(selected).each(function(){
        endDatetime = new Date($(this).attr("data-unixtime") * 1000);
        $(this).countdown({until: endDatetime, serverSync: serverTime});
    });
}

Django template generates each field to be filled with the coundown as such:

<span class="timeLeft" data-unixtime="1334898000"></span>

And I apply timecounting to these field like like this:

initAllTimers('.timeLeft');

And finally Django view method or generating timestamp for this plugin to retrieve (via my serverTime() method):

#points to /ajax/get-server-time/
def get_server_time(request):
    now = datetime.now()
    response = HttpResponse( now.isoformat())
    response['Expires'] = 'Fri, 1 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT'
    response['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain; charset=utf-8'
    response['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache, must-revalidate'
    return response 

It renders correctly but it’s not synced across different computers, my Mac shows a different timeleft to my windows computer.

I suspect I make a mistake at this part:

Is the php example from countdown’s example $now->format("M j, Y H:i:s O")."\n"; same to my python function datetime.now().isoformat() ?

Answer 1

datetime.now().isoformat() is not identical to $now->format("M j, Y H:i:s O")

PHP’s formatting escapes are explained here http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

You can use strftime() to properly format your timestamp in Python; the docs are available here http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior

.strftime("%b %d, %Y %H:%M:%S %z") should be near identical to the PHP format() call; if you do not get a suitable offset from %z, you can manually add +0000 yourself to the Python string.