. . .in the Space-Time Continuum

I have fallen into a chasm that yawns between WordPress, FatCow and MailChimp.

Woe is me.

It’s Friday, and instead of bringing you a fantastic Friday Find–something useful or fun or inspiring–I am on a mission to discover, once and for all, why these blog posts don’t always email to my long-suffering subscribers.

Unfortunately, it seems to involve higher math.  Time zones.  UTC offsets.  Daylight Savings Time.  And, really, for a person who actually passed calculus classes, it is sad how bamboozled I am by time calculations.

Of course, it’s quite likely I’d be bamboozled by differential equations now.  To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I wasn’t then.  I’ve never really understood how I passed calculus. Although, I’m fairly certain it had a lot to do with one fabulous teacher, Miss Impagliazzo at Concord High School.

In the meantime, when I have to figure out times, I turn to one of the best inventions ever:  The Sun Clock which is a graphical representation of day and night and local times around  the world.  (If you want tables of local times, try the World Clock. )

But neither of those clocks seem to be helping me now.

All I know now is that my subscribers might have missed the squirrel post and/or the world in motion post, and MailChimp thinks it’s because the posts were published after the email was scheduled to go out.  But I think that the published time at which they are looking is UTC time and not Eastern Daylight Time, so they didn’t publish after the scheduled email time.

Except, you know, it’s like higher math–so I am not sure at all.  More research is indicated.

For those of you who don’t know, UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time.  (Don’t ask me why its acronym is not CUT.  I guess they didn’t want to use a real word.)  It replaced Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard for time in 1986.  So far, my search has revealed that UTC is based on atomic measurements rather than the earth’s rotation.  Thus, it is supposed to be more accurate.

I’m just trying to get this blog to people’s inboxes every morning.  So I don’t really need the precision of atomic seconds.  I need a schedule that could be described as “around 9-ish.”  How hard is that?

So far, everyone is confused.  WordPress asks me what time zone I’m in.  So, you’d think it would understand that when I schedule a post for a certain time, I mean in my time zone.  Research, however, has indicated that they might mean UTC time.  And the email service says they need about 5 hours between posting and the scheduled distribution time.  But what time zone are they using?  And my web host is just confused.  (Join the club.)

I’m thinking that some of this problem must be that WordPress is using UTC time in the scheduling and disregarding the local time zone.

So….today, we are experimenting.  This post is scheduled to publish at 4:10 am on July 27th.  The email is scheduled to go out at 9 am.

If the WordPress time and the MailChimp time are both local, there are 4 hours and 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it should work.

If one is UTC and the other local, there are only 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it might work.

If….oh, forget it!  Let’s just see what happens.  And today, while you’re reading this–if you’re reading this–I’ll be trying to get somebody to tell me what is happening in which time zone.

If you’re not reading this, I’ll be doing the same thing but you may never know it.

And if, by any chance, you have ever wondered why I don’t write sci-fi time travel stories, I trust the reason is now clear to you and that you are properly grateful.