Recently I've been talking on Twitter about adding websockets support to my energy monitoring web interface. However, before I went too far down this route, I thought it was best that I revisit the current set-up and re-engineer it a bit. Otherwise I could be queuing up pain for later.

Lately I've noticed that JSON and dates/times do not go together well. JSON allows integers, fractional numbers, strings, arrays and so on, but no way to natively specify a point in time. It turns out this relatively minor-sounding point can cause a fair bit more pain than it probably should.