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RE: Date format

Brent Simmons — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:40:48 GMT

ollie -- I've just done this here in the lab. It will appear in the next beta.

RE: Date format

Brent Simmons — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:48:36 GMT

Good call -- I've added it to the list. (No promises about when I'd get to it, of course.)

RE: Date format

ollie — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:54:55 GMT

Jumping on this thread to suggest a feature.

The news item date (at least in the JavaScript enabled layouts) to be included using Microformat like mark-up:

http://microformats.org/wiki/date

Including the ISO date in a title attribute would enable JavaScript included in the NNW stylesheet to present the date in a more flexible manner. Primarily, to my mind, optionally more humane fuzzy or relative date-times such as:
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 months ago

This is made less scary to code by existing code such as:
http://timeago.yarp.com/

RE: Date format

gulliver — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:54:01 GMT

Good point.

It's not 2008-09-10 11:38:40 itself that's the cause of the uncertainty, as with the year preface the whole ISO thing comes easier to mind.

The real confusion is when dates are written without a year, or the year is a suffix - 09-10-2008 is a problem because in the US it'll be Sep 10, 2008 and Europe/elsewhere Oct 9, 2008.

As dates usually aren't written in the ISO format, when seeing stuff which is ISO format, a common habit is to use the 'whatever you normally do' bit of the brain and just stick a year in front of it - hence, the wrong day and month confusion.

My wife's from the US - and it causes all sorts of non-fun issues.

Most of the time it's not a massive problem - but when tired/careless, things go awry.

Having thought more about this issue, the whole ISO/RFC format is logical and good.

Back to the NNW listing... the DD MMM format in my listing pane appears at odds with the US MM-DD form and doesn't appear to be influenced by the setting of the machine on which it's running.

RE: Date format

Spyder — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:16:45 GMT

[quote][b]gulliver (9/23/2008)[/b][hr]To non-Americans 2008-09-10 11:38:40 requires the mental calculation of 'is that September 10, or November 9?'. [/quote]
Off Topic: when you see a date like that, you need to forget country conventions and think like a geek. That is a variation on the ISO standard date format; specifically designed to make sorting easy by putting the digits in order from fastest-changing to slowest-changing (this means you can use a very fast, and very simple, numeric sort).

I'm Australian, but 20080910 is always 10th September because I'm a programmer ;)

RE: Date format

gulliver — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:15:11 GMT

[quote][b]Jonathon McDougall (9/23/2008)[/b][hr]Actually, looking a little further, the date format is based on your computer system settings. Go to:

System Preferences > Date and Time > Open International > Formats > Customize

That will allow you to change how they appear.[/quote]

Thanks.

I appreciate your above-and-beyond attention and help.
And genuinely not wishing to labor the point, I'm thinking I was initially mistaken.

After checking my date formats, I couldn't see any change.
(My short->medium->long->full formats are 23/9/08; Sep 23 2008; September 23 2008; Tuesday September 23 2008.)

My NNW upper 'listing' pane still displays the title with a 23 Sep date format alongside.
And the lower 'read' pane displays the source of the feed and a 23/9/08 12:38 date format alongside.

It'd be 'nice' to have 23 Sep display as Sep 23 - but it's hardly a major issue.
And on the 23/9/08 12:38... I don't seem to have an issue with that format in Thunderbird, where I mentally and without problem note it as 'twenty-third of the ninth'), so it looks like I was just being dumb or mistaken.

Having re-looked at Movable Type, with their Entry Date format of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS, it's likely that which triggered my 'sort the dates, so there's no confusion' action.

It's their format of 2008-09-23 11:38:40 which causes the confusion... and more so when the day number is 12 or less. To non-Americans 2008-09-10 11:38:40 requires the mental calculation of 'is that September 10, or November 9?'.

Whatever. ;-)

RE: Date format

Jonathon McDougall — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:45:31 GMT

Actually, looking a little further, the date format is based on your computer system settings. Go to:

System Preferences > Date and Time > Open International > Formats > Customize

That will allow you to change how they appear.

RE: Date format

gulliver — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:28:56 GMT

Thanks.

Using traditional view, in the (upper) listing pane the date format is 22 Sep 2008 and below when reading (preview?) is 22/09/2008.

It's the same in the combined view - so I'm wondering if that latter (22/09/2008) occurrence is directly from the feed, whereas NNW somehow rejigs it (to 22 Sep 2008) for the listing.

It may seem a small point, and of course 22/09 isn't easily mistaken - certainly not as much as something like 05/09, where my brain has to do a mental 'Is that May 9, or Sept 5' (or look upward).

RE: Date format

Jonathon McDougall — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:34:17 GMT

OK, Now we are in the right forum, the question still remains - where in NNW :)

Are you using the combined view, or tradtional/widescreen view? If you are using traditional or widescreen then the style defines the date format in the CSS. You can either pick a style with a date format you like, create your own style, or modify an existing one.

If that's a little beyond what you are comfortable doing, you can always request something frmo the Styles and NewsPapers Forum.

Taking a quick look at the combined view, it appears to use a three-letter month so I assume that's not where the problem is...

Hope that helps! :)

RE: Date format

gulliver — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:46:28 GMT

Oooooops!

I'll now hang my head and shame and slide out the back door... for not being sufficiently alert to have posted in the correct (NetNewsWire) forum.

I get days like this. ;-) ;-(

RE: Date format

Jonathon McDougall — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:28:08 GMT

Can you tell me where you are seeing this? In NewsGator Online, the dates are in the format MMM-DD-YYYY. E.g. Sep-21-2008

Date format

gulliver — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:30:30 GMT

Is it possible to change the date format?

Example: 11/09/2008 12:38 is potentially confusing to non-US readers - who'll need to think whether that 11 is November or September.

In the listing, the date shows as 11 Sept, so surely it'd not be difficult.