Astronomy Blog

Convert to local time in Firefox

Rocket launches and interesting events in astronomy attract global audiences. The main problem with these events is that the times are usually quoted in some time zone that is not the one I'm in. This leaves me trying to remember how many hours ahead or behind the quoted time zone is from the time zone I'm in. It gets even more fiddly when you have to take into account daylight savings. If only there was a solution...

A long time ago I made some JavaScript to display the timestamps on my blog posts in local time. Apart from some daylight savings bugs, the problem with that script was that it only worked on my site. Tonight, whilst waiting for the launch of NASA's Kepler mission, I thought I'd try to make that script more useful by turning it into a Firefox bookmark that could be applied to any webpage I happened to be on. It seems to work so I thought I'd share it.

In Firefox right click your Bookmarks Toolbar and select "New Bookmark". This should bring up a small window that lets you set a Name, Location, Keyword and Description. In Name enter something like "Local Time". In the Location box enter the contents of this file. Now, whenever you click the bookmark, any nicely formatted time on the page should be converted to your computer's local time.