Reformatting post dates in Blogger Dashboard

In the Blogger Dashboard, the posting date of your entries are in mm/dd/yy format and Google doesn't provide a way to localize it or choose a date format. Here's how you can use a Greasemonkey script to convert dates in Dashboard to dd/mm/yy format.

The dates in Dashboard have this structure:

<td class="date">
  <span>3/6/09</span>
</td>

The following script uses jQuery to iterate through all span nodes of td elements with a date class attribute, then applies the Javascript string replace() function to swap the first two numbers in the span node. To change the output string, just modify the second argument of the replace() function.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           blogger.com localize dashboard date
// @namespace      kamhungsoh.com
// @description    Convert date format from m/d/yy to d/m/yy.
// @require        http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js
// @include        http://www.blogger.com/posts.g*
// ==/UserScript==

$("td.date > span").each(function() {
  var s = $(this).text().replace(/(\d+)\/(\d+)/, '$2\/$1');
  $(this).text(s);
});

The first argument of the replace() function is a regular expression where \d is a meta-character for a digit, + matches one or more of the preceding character (e.g. 4 or 23) and the parentheses group the characters to be memorised. The forward slash has to be escaped, \/, to allow us to match it in the input string. In the second argument, the $2/$1 represents the second and first memorised strings.