I could not be happier ever since I switched from Wordpress to Octopress. I usually write and publish blog posts from where I live, Berlin. The time zone here is CET (UTC+1). While recently visiting Mozilla’s HQ in Mountain View I wrote another blog post just as usual and typed “rake generate” to turn my Markdown files into static HTML files.

Looking at the output though, got me a little puzzled. All timestamps were changed to be calculated off the PDT time zone. While certainly that is not a big deal as they are still the same timestamps, I did not feel like changing all of those every now and then I am somewhere in a different time zone.

If you want to use a “static” time zone when generating your page, do it like this:

TZ=CET rake generate

TL;DR - put your time zone into the TZ variable if you want to force Jekyll to use a specific time zone when generating your HTML files.