Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tips on using python’s datetime module. Wow. I’ve run in to problems with datetime and timezones before, but I had no idea how intrinsic those problems were to the design of the library. 6th July 2009, 2:20 pm

Making the HTML5 time element safe for historians. PPK presents a detailed history of dates and calendars and points out that the HTML5 time element is ill prepared to faithfully represent the kind of dates historians are interested in. 6th April 2009, 2:01 pm

Datejs—A JavaScript Date Library. Building a date API around chaining—Date.today().next().thursday()—is a neat concept. I’d like to see that adapted for Python’s datetime library. 3rd December 2007, 9:01 pm

calendar.timegm() (via) An “unrelated but handy function” that converts a time.gmtime() in to a corresponding Unix timestamp. I’ve been hand-rolling this one for years; never thought to look in calendar. 3rd September 2007, 1:54 am

Django vs feedparser on dates. Some useful tips in the comments. I find Python’s timezone stuff endlessly frustrating: I know it can do what I want, but it always takes me a ridiculously long time to figure out the necessary incantations. 2nd September 2007, 10:17 am