Instagram dates do not include timezone offset

[aaronpk]

It looks like Granary is displaying dates from Instagram feeds as UTC, but then not including the timezone offset. (I'm using the Instagram to HTML conversion). It should either explicitly set the +0000 or Z offset if it's converting to UTC, or if it knows the local time then set that offset instead.

(XRay looks up the timezone for the photo's location and converts it to a local time, but you might not want to do that.)

[snarfed]

thanks for filing! funny, I'm working on another timezone bug right now, #126, so I'll tackle this one too.

[snarfed]

hey again. is this in atom? published and updated there should always have the Z suffix. or somewhere else?

XRay looks up the timezone for the photo's location and converts it to a local time

you mean literally, like with a GIS service and timezone database, right? so far i haven't found any other time zone or location info in IG's embedded JSON in media or user pages. and that only works for photos with locations, right?

[snarfed]

(if this is atom, i doubt the fix for #126 fixed it too, but it's very slightly possible.)

[aaronpk]

I haven't checked the Atom feed, I was using the HTML one. And yeah XRay has a really simple timezone lookup service built in which uses the location of the photo to find the local timezone

[snarfed]

thanks! then yeah, this is actually expected. if i don't know the time zone, i leave timestamps naive, ie time zone unaware, so they don't include an offset or Z.

i'm happy to leave this open as a feature request to look up and add time zones by location when available, if you want. let me know if you have anything else in mind.

[aaronpk]

The dates that Granary is returning are always in UTC though, so Granary should add the Z. Since Instagram provides unix timestamps in the JSON, that's always an exact point in time, not a floating time.

[snarfed]

discussed in IRC, checked and confirmed that instagram's unix timestamps are UTC. fixed! thanks again for reporting.