Category Ideajam Lotus
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I was giving some thought to the Domino server yesterday, and how the Domino server is able to host multiple Domino websites using Internet Site documents. I believe this is a strength of the Domino server, even though it is a "required" feature for any industrial-strength Web server. I was specifically thinking of servers used to host Domino blogs - and how those blogs are created and managed from people scattered all over the world - especially at hosting sites like Connectria, PSC or DominoDeveloper.net. It then occurred to me that one thing I don't like about having my blog hosted is that my blog runs on the time zone where the server is located - or more specifically, the time zone set for the server itself. I think it would be a very nice feature if the Domino administrator could pick a time zone for any internet site hosted on the server - but to be honest, I wasn't sure if this was already possible. I asked Gabriella Davis of the Turtle Partnership if it was already possible, and she told me that it wasn't - and that led me to post the idea on IdeaJam.

So, I went ahead and posted my second idea there. It is entitled, "Allow internet sites to be assigned different time zones", and here is the content of the idea:

Domino servers have the ability to host different websites. It would be very helpful if you could set up your different internet sites to have different time zones. Treat each site timezone as an offset from the server's time zone, and allow each site's actions to process under the set localized time zone. This would be a great feature, and very beneficial to allow Domino to be more viewed as an enterprise-level web server.

While talking to Gab she reminded me that we may be able to code an interim solution at the Domino application level - it is already done in the DWA/Webmail interfaces, where it asks you for your time zone. Given this has been done at that level, I may explore coding something like that for my blog, and then contributing it to Blogsphere - but before I do so, I wanted to mention it here and maybe discuss it with y'all, to help me vet the idea and even do some preliminary design work on it.

So, I leave it to you, gentle LotusGeek reader - is this a good idea? If so, please go to IdeaJam and vote for it (here). If you think it is a good idea, what are some ways we could code an interim solution at the application/database level? Let's do some "paper prototyping" here and see if we can get this worked out.

Rock