For a few days I’ve been wrangling over a problem with a newly-installed Wordpress blog of mine, whereby there would be about an hour delay between when I first published a post and when the post finally shows up publically. Edits of existing posts were fine; the delay was just in newly-published posts.
After a lot of back and forth with various support teams, as it turns out, the problem originates in Wordpress itself, and the way that it timestamps a published post. Wordpress uses UTC time (aka Greenwich time), and then you specify an offset, depending on where you live. Because I live in Massachusetts, I set my WP options to Eastern time, which is UTC -5.
The thing is, back in October we went on Daylight Savings Time, setting the clock back an hour. But Wordpress doesn’t make any automatic adjustments for DST, since DST is just a contrivance, really, for our convenience.
To fix the problem, I had to change my UTC from UTC -5 to UTC -6 for the duration of DST. Now my posts appear immediately, with no delay. When we go off DST in April, I’ll have to change it back again.
Strange problem, and a relief to have it solved. Drove me crazy for awhile, but sometimes problems like this can create a great opportunity for learning!
Wonder if this means that my posts will appear an hour EARLIER than the actual posting time if I forget to change it back after we return to standard time?