Sundial

25 Jul 2011: Sundial has been superseded by dialti.me. It will remain available for use, but it won't see any further development.

Sundial is a simple answer to a simple problem.

I make a lot of international calls at work to clients and prospects. Unfortunately, many of the calls are to different people in different cities. I'm not yet at a point where I associate US area codes with timezones (nor country codes with timezones for that matter), and I'm not sure I ever want to be that familiar with them.

My process used to be laborious:

  1. Visit Bennet Yee's Area Code Listing, by Number and look up the state to which the area code corresponds.
  2. Visit Wikipedia and look up the capital city of the state.
  3. Visit the World Clock Meeting Planner and see how our timezones overlap.

This got old pretty fast.

Sundial is a webservice which takes any old telephone number and, if it's a US number, produces a timezone comparision chart for me straight away.

At present, Sundial is freely available for public use but is still under development. New versions will use the current date to work out whether to apply daylight savings time or not, and in the future I might add support for international numbers outside of the US, too.

Usage: http://benjaminasmith.com/tools/sundial/%s
       where %s is the telephone number to lookup.

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