My posts were being moved 5 hours forwards in time after applying the hack - which was both insanely annoying and totally impractical.

After three hours poring over PHP and nearly going insane trying to work out what doing what to which (time stuff is a nightmare) I finally arrived at a very dirty little hack that fixed it.

Here's what I did: Open up story.php (in your admin directory) and search for calls to the function "strtotime()" - there are two calls, one at line 185 and one at line 884. "strtotime" takes a plaintext string, describing a date, and converts it into UNIX time.

OK, so at the end of the string you are going to add a description of you time zone (mine is BST, British Summer Time) and then an offset in hours (i.e the time difference between where your server really is, and where you'd like it to pretend it is).

Confused? Yeah me too, here's an example showing how line 884 looked after I'd hacked it:

Let me explain: My timezone is India/New Delhi - where we are on BST - which is what I want displayed on my site. BST is 5 hours ahead of EST, where my web server lives. You may think that adding both BST and -5 hours is just plain wrong - and you'd be right (I said it was a dirty hack). The point is, it works.

The whole reason for this mess is that the timezone PHP hack only affects PHP - but story.php gets it's dates by asking MySQL what the time is - so Blogger ends up wiith two conflicting ideas about the time.

One more thing, this hack is likely to go wrong when we move in or out of daylight saving time.

It's all very complex: the Blogger database dates articles in UNIX time (which is a sort of GMT). Your server works in it's local time, and then you hack your PHP environment to look like it's in yet another time zone. No wonder stuff goes wrong!