Self learning

Self learning has been challenging. Building my blog website application from scratch has been fun but has not been the smoothest experience. I know what I want to implement and need to work to implement the features. The problem is that the work schedule is in my head and not written down. My focus is jumping from one thing to another thing. I'll be working on the layout of the comments and notice something in the comment form I want to improve and switch jobs. And neither one gets fixed. I will be figuring out a schedule of work to do and follow it.

Adding Date and Time to my Rails Blog App

For my blog posts and comments I wanted to display the date and time. Fortunately, the models automatically add the attribute created_at of datetime during the migration to the database. This allows me to just call the created_at attribute from the posts and comments table to display them after they have been created.

I got my first problem when I added it to my view. It appeared as 2009-12-14 08:25:51-1000. That's not what I wanted. I wanted December 14th, 2009 8:25AM. And this gave me another problem, the time was 10 hours off. I wanted Hawaii time so it should have been 2009-12-13 22:25:51-1000.

After a lot of searching I was able to piece together a solution. I have rails 2.3.3.

To format date and time I modified config/enviroment.rb. Looking at this file I found config.time_zone = 'UTC'. I didn't know what UTC was but above it had Run "rake -D time" for a list of tasks for finding time zone names. So I ran 'rake -D time' in my terminal and was given 'rake time:zones:local' which I ran and was given Hawaii as my time zone. So I changed config.time_zone = 'UTC' to config.time_zone = 'Hawaii'. This gave me my date and time but not the right format.

I wanted December 14th, 2009 8:25AM. To get this I had to create my format. I eventually found rails module for conversions. I then had to figure out what %Y-%m-%d meant. When I found the meaning I wrote the code below to display my date and time format. I also found to get 1 to display as 1st, 2 as 2nd, 14 as 14th, 23 as 23rd I had to add ordinalize to the day.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!(

:time => '%I:%M%p',

:date => lambda { |time| time.strftime("%B #{time.day.ordinalize}, %Y") }

)

Format Meaning

%a The abbreviated weekday name (“Sun'’)

%A The full weekday name (“Sunday'’)

%b The abbreviated month name (“Jan'’)

%B The full month name (“January'’)

%c The preferred local date and time representation

%d Day of the month (01..31)

%H Hour of the day, 24-hour clock (00..23)

%I Hour of the day, 12-hour clock (01..12)

%j Day of the year (001..366)

%m Month of the year (01..12)

%M Minute of the hour (00..59)

%p Meridian indicator (“AM'’ or “PM'’)

%S Second of the minute (00..60)

%U Week number of the current year, starting with the first Sunday as the first day of the first week (00..53)

%W Week number of the current year, starting with the first Monday as the first day of the first week (00..53)

%w Day of the week (Sunday is 0, 0..6)

%x Preferred representation for the date alone, no time

%X Preferred representation for the time alone, no date

%y Year without a century (00..99)

%Y Year with century

%Z Time zone name

%% Literal “%'’ character

In my view I added:

%= comment.created_at.to_s(:date) %

%= comment.created_at.to_s(:time) %

Now every post and comment has a correct date and time.