How we send a morning email to users around the world. | Hacker News Reader

How we send a morning email to users around the world.

strideapp.com

37 pointsadrianpike13 comments

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I wonder if the cron job should be run every 1/2 hour to catch timezones that are 1/2 hour offsets?

(There are even more than I thought)

http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/offsettime...

@grecy, good question.

It actually still works as expected.

If the time in Pakistan, for example, is 7:00am, then the time in India is 7:30am. The code just checks the hour, which would be 7 in either case.

> There are even more [1/2 hour offset timezones] than I thought

I was pretty surprised at that as well when building http://hackertimezone.com. I always assumed it was mostly confined to small island chains and so forth, but there's some world cities in there as well.

my personal favorite is the 45minute offset: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Islands#Chathams_Time

Thanks! jsTimezoneDetect is something I've been looking for.

I'm glad to have helped you find it.

Thanks to Jon Nylander for maintaining it (https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/).

I would prefer a settings page where i can opt in oder out for certain mailings (if not mandatory) and set the timesettings myself.

Relying on the header information might lead to wrong results as some people changed settings and it relies on the browser. (Though i guess thats not valid for many users)

But while you're there, one can also set time to receive emails themself. Maybe i want to have it earlier because half of my tasks already need to be done by 7am.

Of course, the best is to combine both, having a settings page with default value gathered from the browser.

Nice article which really covers the problem many people aren't thinking about.

We do have a user override for timezone, and we're using it to track how many mistakes we're getting from the browser - we were expecting it to be pretty hit & miss, but we've actually seen great success.

Good thought about being able to change when morning emails fire. The 7am is really a relic from when we first started, even before we had the rolling timezones - we were trying to hit a time that worked for west coasters & east coasters alike, and sure enough, we got a ton of overseas users way sooner than we thought, so out came the rolling timezones. :)

I was impressed when I first recieved the Monday morning recap. One thing though, the cutsey "Monday's aren't so bad" thing became pretty stale. I was really hoping they would be different every week, as it came across as being really personal.

Thanks for that - we'll take that to heart on our next revision of our emails. :)

I thought this was going to talk about how to send 10s or 100s of thousands (millions?) of emails in a small timeframe, which would be an interesting problem, and may be for Stride at some point!

> "if cron fails completely"

How often does this happen, and why? If this problem is inherent to cron, are there alternatives that are [possibly] better suited to server work?

Cron's probably the wrong term to use there - the failures I usually see are on the code or environment side, and usually it's a PITA to try and refire missed cron events once you fix the bugs.

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