Displaying time and timezone information to the user (what, not how)

Question

(This is a question about the UI rather than the technology required to do it)

What is the clearest way to display a time for events occurring in different timezones

Answer 1

The strategy should be that times in the UI -- when shown to or entered by the user -- are in the user's own timezone.

In the application on the other hand, i.e. in Ruby code and in the database, times are always kept in the UTC timezone.

Your job then becomes to allow the user to select a timezone, and then to convert back and forth between this timezone and the UTC timezone as needed.

This article illustrates how to do so in a Rails environment.

That implies to be able to retrieve the user timezone or to have stored that timezone in a 'user' table.