Internet-Ti.me

Internet Time reference and (eventually) converter site, for planning things with your internet friends who aren't (yet) obsessed with Internet Time 😉

Link to any Internet Time by putting it after https://internet-ti.me/ to embed a quick text and/or image reference of times around the world - like https://internet-ti.me/@000 or https://internet-ti.me/@420. You can also omit the @, as some social networks get aggressive about username autocompletion with it.

Why

As someone with friends across the world, and who's travelled across the date line plenty, I've long been a fan of Internet Time. I've even built @Watch, which can put the current Internet Time on your Apple Watch face.

Not everyone thinks in Internet Time though, so they need some help!

Once I realised that internet-ti.me was available to buy I knew what I had to do - make a site which uses a combination of Open Graph and Twitter Cards metadata to make Internet Time embeddable in various social and chat platforms.

How

It's built in CGI because I am ever the anachronist, with some fairly basic Python. In part because Python has some reasonable image composition tools built-in, and because it was simple to iterate on.

.htaccess rewrite rules make the URLs feel pretty and modern, and then under the hood index.cgi and image.cgi do the lifting of generating the page, and the preview image respectively.

Page HTML templates are processed using Jinja2, and preview images are generated using Pillow.

I also reused a Gatekeeper class I wrote nearly a decade ago, which semi-automates the CGI response process. I'm not sure I should've, though! 😅

Development

A basic development server script is included at bin/dev-server. It runs on localhost:8000. Note that this server doesn't handle rewrite rules, which makes it necessary to test the scripts via the cgi-bin directory and the required parameters.

While the root directory of this repository is intended to map directly to the root htdocs directory of a server, with no dependencies other than those available out of the box on my web host, a requirements.txt is provided which contains dependencies for development.