Alternatively, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UTC. It was a little more subtle than I had expected to ensure that Jekyll uses an arbitrary timezone for dates in posts and their generated URLs, but is that even a Good Thing™ to do?
My posts were timestamped in their YAML front matter like so:
date: 2014-01-03 07:00:00 +0800
Then I tried adding this to _config.yml:
timezone: Australia/Perth
It appeared that this had no effect at all. URLs were still being generated based on the date in UTC, and displayed post dates were still:
2014-01-02 23:00 UTC
Technically the same date, but not quite what I wanted. After emailing GitHub and receiving very quick and friendly responses, it turns out that both the timezone offset and the seconds must be omitted:
date: 2014-01-03 07:00
However, in the time that passed, I realised that doing this would actually be short-sighted; it would lock this website into one timezone. Not permanently, perhaps, but one would have to use the same timezone for all posts.
What if, one day, I decide that Perth no longer has the same homely charm, and I grow tired of living in a city where absolutely nothing happens? Heresy, I know, but it's possible.
As an aside, when doing the above, the displayed post dates would be like:
2014-01-03 07:00 Aus
Perhaps using %Z in Jekyll simply takes the first three
characters of the tzdata name.
Just stick with UTC.