Depending on how you accomplish your caching, it may be possible to output times with a special tag around them, then, before they are sent out, search for the tags, and replace all the times as applicable.

On the server side you mean? I was thinking of doing the same thing, just on the client side -- letting the browser replace the times with the converted local time.

As far as I understand it, Ruby on Rails will store the cached page as a file. I'm not 100% sure the cached page can't be modified before it is sent but if I had to guess I'd say that it can't be modified.

It might be too good to be true but I didn't seem to have any problems with this. Browsers come with a function called Date.UTC() which takes a UTC time which you can just put into the browser's date constructor:

localDate = new Date(Date.UTC(y,m,d,hr,mn));

When you output that date it's in the browser's local time.

I just output the UTC time from the server into the middle of some Javascript code that does document.write() to put the local date there. You can dig into FanConcert's Javascript if you're really interested.

yeah, I just have pissues using javascript implementations where I could do something server side. It's comes from the old days of doing Javascript for Netscape 4 vs. IE 4. There are still some times when Javascript is nice, but I always like to keep it to a minimum. It's a nice little JS hack you did, and probably the simplest way to fix the problem. But what about the half of the population who either have their time set incorrectly or just clicked continue when windows asked about their time zone, and therefore picked PST, event though they live in EST, or England.