FSC Fix It: Time Zones

While scheduling a blog post this week, we ran into a problem that we didn’t see coming.  Our clock was off by nine hours.  So when we scheduled 2010: The Year Facebook Took Over Part 2, it posted at midnight instead of 9 am the next morning.  Oops.  Probably not a terrible thing for us, but imagine if that happened to Apple and they accidentally posted a press release announcing the latest iPhone nine hours early.  Major oops.

How many times have you had that facepalm moment when you think “Ok, I’ve broken the internet, what do I do now?”  That’s what happened to us.  Luckily, resident genius Adele Tiblier came to the rescue.  With her patented cry of “Challenge!” Adele went right to work.

Here’s what she did:
AT: First off, I laughed at Steve for screwing up a blog post.  I mean, how do you mess up scheduling a post?  Then I got down to business.

Changing time zones in WordPress is easy, but you probably didn't think about it until now either.

I pinged our server to see what was going on and what time it thought it was, but that didn’t work.  Then I thought “OOH, it’s a WordPress site, so let me check the General Settings for time zone within the blog.”

As it turns out, it was still set to the default UTC time, so the blog thought it posted it at 9 am, but we were 6 hours behind.  All I had to do was change the settings so our next scheduled post is set on CST.

It was an easy fix, but it wasn’t a problem anyone had thought of before it happened.  Mark this one down in the “Lesson Learned” category.

Have you run into any similar problems recently?  We want to hear about them.  Leave a comment and tell us about your deceptively simple situation.

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