Not sure if this will help you, but here goes.
I developed a (very basic) small blog type thing, where me and my friends would write shit down. It was originally hosted on my box at home, but I later moved it to a PHP server in the USA. I had a dilemma - the dates were all stuffing up (due to the change of server locale). My date/time of the posting was stored in a mySQL db as a unix timestamp (created using php's time() function). I then wrote the following jigitty to display the time correctly, despite the locale of the server. You can see below the timestamp of the post resides inside $row["msgDate"]. For people who do not live in Brisbane, change the value 36000 to suit your timezone offset.
date("D jS M Y | g:ia | ", $row["msgDate"] - date("Z",time()) + 36000);
HTH,
Adam
