Date Convertor (couple ideas)

[Drashner1]

So, a couple ideas for the eventual redesign:

1) How hard would it be to code up a converter that would let a user enter a given AD date and get the equivalent date in AT format (day, month, year)?

2) Would it be possible to create a 'date display' for the site main page that would display today's date in AT format (day, month, year)? This would at a bit of detail to the site and a link next to it or it could be clicked to take a user to the EG on the AT calendar.

Thoughts?

Todd

[Worldtree]

the one problem with this is..what about relativity? Are we going to consider the small population of OA civilization that is on the move at relativistic speeds?

there was a conversation in late february about this topic on the yahoo groups (message #98272, for example)

would we say that this is the date on earth?

[Drashner1]

This would just be the date on Earth and would mostly be an instance of being both 'cute' and strange at the same time. We do something like this now (manually) with the AT dates that are displayed on the Updates page:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...en_updates

The goal would be a mix of 'cool' , giving people a sense this is not their Grandma's sci-fi setting, and (by putting a link on or next to the date display) introducing them to a major (although also quiet) aspect of the setting. We could link to the article on the AT calendar as well as the related articles on Relativity and the impossibility of a single dating scheme, etc. Gives people an interesting and fairly relate-able intro to the setting (my thinking is that the redesigned main page should incorporate many many gateways for getting into the setting. This could be one of them).

Todd

[ronbennett]

This would just be the date on Earth and would mostly be an instance of being both 'cute' and strange at the same time. We do something like this now (manually) with the AT dates that are displayed on the Updates page

Todd
[/quote]

A nice idea. If both dates are displayed one possibility is to label the dates as "RL" and "OA Universe"

Ron

[iancampbell]

The calculation is trivial, if both dates are still on Earth. (Unlikely in OA canon as very few humans or close to it get to Earth, I know.) At a pinch, I could do this in Excel; I don't know enough about such languages as Javascript to be able to tell how much of a problem it is on a web page.

[Worldtree]

This idea has my vote then.

[DataPacRat]

The calculation is trivial, if both dates are still on Earth. (Unlikely in OA canon as very few humans or close to it get to Earth, I know.) At a pinch, I could do this in Excel; I don't know enough about such languages as Javascript to be able to tell how much of a problem it is on a web page.

I don't know about Javascript, but I do know it can be done in Java...

[iancampbell]

The calculation is trivial, if both dates are still on Earth. (Unlikely in OA canon as very few humans or close to it get to Earth, I know.) At a pinch, I could do this in Excel; I don't know enough about such languages as Javascript to be able to tell how much of a problem it is on a web page.

I don't know about Javascript, but I do know it can be done in Java...

Which just proves how little I know about Web programming.