date() Question
 

This is probably a dumb one, but out of curiosity does the date(), time(), and other such time-related functions return the time of the server that is hosting the php page, OR does it return the time of the computer of the user who's viewing the page? I can't tell this locally on my computer 'cause obviously my Apache server and my computer are sharing the same time.

It is parsed by the server, so returns server time. I am not aware of any server-side language method to check the time of the person who's browsing.

local time
 

If you want to get the user's time/date, you need to use something like javascript.