Time Stamp Total Confusion

  • I posted a question in here earlier, and it was answered promptly and helpfully. That encourages me to ask how to solve a new problem I have!

    My problem is the time stamp. Honest to God, I do not even begin to understand how it works. I’ve looked at the FAQ, and the explanation there for changing a date doesn’t address my issue. My issue is that I just published (about 10 minutes ago) a post with the title “Marry Him! (Even If You Can’t Stand Him). I live in the USA, East Coast, and even though it was still Feb. 9 when I published the post (and still is, actually), the date on my published post was Feb. 10. Perhaps I should have just left it like that — hey, it’ll be Feb. 10 in a few hours anyway, right? But God made me stubborn. So I went into Edit Post and tried, about a dozen times (at least) to change the time stamp so that the post would be Feb. 9, at 10 pm or so (it’s now 10:25 pm here). But what happened was that the system interpreted the time as being am not pm (I don’t know why), and my just-published post was moved way back in the queue.

    I know the time formatting is in some programming language called PHP, and I tried to figure out a solution by looking at the table of PHP characters. Bad mistake. I got even more confused. I simply do not understand how that time stamp works. I know there’s got to be some kind of rational thinking behind it, but to me it makes no sense that I can figure. I know it’s not, but it feels totally arbitrary to me because I don’t know how it works.

    However, I’m certain that there are many people here who understand this a whole lot better than I do. So if someone can explain to me how to modify the time stamp in such a way that my Marry Him! post will be on top, I would be endlessly grateful.

    You guys are awesome, truly. Thank you in advance.

    Kathy

  • Hi,

    Your blog’s Time Zone is set to 0, which means the post date and time is displayed in GMT.

    Go to the Options/General tab of your dashboard, and change “Times in the blog should differ by:” to “-5” (that’s US Eastern time, GMT minus 5 hours). Any new posts you write will then be displayed with your local time.

    That won’t affect previously published posts. After you’ve fixed the time zone you can edit the post, adjust the timestamp and resave it if you want.

  • Tellyworth (or anyone):

    Thank you. I changed my blog’s Time Zone setting to -5.

    Now that I’ve done that, can you, or anyone who sees this and knows the answer, tell me what time to enter in my Marry Him! post so that it goes to the top? Nothing I try works, and I’m getting very frustrated. Typing in the time that it was when I published the post doesn’t work. Nothing works.

  • Never mind the above. I’ve fixed the problem. I still have no idea what I should have put in the time stamp box, but it came to me that I could just copy and paste the entire post into a new box, which would have the Publish button, and then just publish it and delete the duplicate post. That’s what I did, and it worked.

  • If you want to put a post at the top of your blog, you have to make it more “recent” than the post at the top right now. So if that one says “6pm January 10th” you need to pick a time between then and now. Picking a future time will make it invisible until that time comes along, and then it will post.

    If you post something else now, it will go on top of your Marry Him! post. If you go in and edit “Marry Him” to two minutes after the other post, it’ll go back on top.

    Does that clarify?

  • It does clarify, raincoaster, thank you.

  • Good, glad to hear it. The post at the top thing is a big fiddle.

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