Hey! Something cool happened.
I embarked on another voyage to find a shapefile containing all the boundaries for the zoneinfo rules… Lo and behold, with a little digging, I found it! This is going to save me a ton of trouble. Now I have to spend a few evenings coming up with JavaScript to read directly from tz itself, so that the Widget can update itself whenever time zone rules change (as has happened in Caracas recently).
I’m aware that the images on the site are broken. This happened when I botched an update to WordPress. Sorry about that; I’ll have it fixed eventually. Luckily I held on to the original PSDs.
There’s some cool stuff in the pipe in addition to World Clock Pro 3. I also have some neat ideas for more posts to this blog, so stay tuned for that!
And lastly, I’m sorry about the lack of news. I’ve been working on a transition from an engineering position at Yahoo! to that of a designer, so I’ve been rather busy both at work and at home.
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Where did you find this? I am looking for something similar. Thanks
Hey there redhat, Glad to be of help.
I found it on Yahoo! search. :-) http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=TZ+shapefile (second result)
I didn’t find exactly the same file as I did the last time, but this purports to map to tz:
http://efele.net/maps/tz.zip
…and I might use this one instead, because it actually has the tzids built in, whereas the one I have does not.
It’s a shapefile, which is a common format for geographic data. Unfortunately for me, I have to convert the database to an entirely different format since JavaScript can’t read binary data, but there are classes for many different languages which will read the information in straightaway. Do a search like this:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=PHP+shapefile+class
Good luck with whatever it is you’re working on (now I’m curious)!
EDIT: Okay, sorry… That only maps to the United States. Let me do some more digging.
EDIT 2: Here’s the original link I found: http://forums.topografix.com/index.php?showtopic=1164 (third result in the search). Scroll down to the bottom post for the fixed information. It doesn’t have the tzids though, which means we’re going to have to do some data manipulation.