Drupal Time?
Tuesday, 13th December 2011Drupal Time?
Railway time was the name given to the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840. This was the first recorded occasion when a number of different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all of the other railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years. The times schedules by which trains were organised and the times train stations clocks displayed was brought in line with the local time for London or "London Time". This was also the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s,[1] India in around 1860,[2] and as well as other countries in Europe, also prompted the introduction of standard time systems influenced by the specific, geographical, industrial development and political governance appertaining.
The key purpose behind introducing railway time was twofold: to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
When I first looked into this subject of timezones I didn't realise how many people didn't know how timezones came to be, or that they came to be from a private company - GWR - and relatively not that long ago.
Times are different and we are now working in the world of the intangible when it comes to software, but I think the same rules apply - human kind has a great potential to benefit from these compromises such as time zones in terms of how we can leverage the stable platform it provides. With standardisation comes an element of non-excitement, however the value proposition of what you can build on top of that platform once in place is surely more alluring than forever bubbling away down below continuously reinventing the wheel?
Every day I see people doing the equivalent of creating a custom car for everyone who wants to drive from A to B when what most people want is a Ford Escort because they just want to sell X to Y in order to get Z out of it. In Drupal we have that, however we don't express that well enough to those who matter IMHO, and that's those on the ground who have to provide this online experience to those who have little knowledge, experience, and indeed cash in order to get themselves more connected. We with the knowledge have a duty IMHO to help those who don't, make most use of the technology available, and it shouldn't always be about this I know more than you who can piss up the tree high enough argument.
As I've often said, in the last ten years no-one's asked me to build rocket science for them. I don't use Drupal because it's an elegant solution to a problem, I use Drupal because it's there, already done for me, tested, working, etc. - well, to the 90-odd percent anyway - and means I can get on with something more interesting instead, like wondering whether to press "submit" on this blog article or not. Anyways, long-time readers will already know the answer to that one. Laters.