Less Dependency on GNU Tools

I recently ran a test of nb from my cyberspace.org account, but reconfigured my environment to not include the GNU tools with bash as the exception. Almost immediately I encountered problems, the first of which was from the date string format, "+%z", which I use to get the timezone. Not that major as you can set it manually using BLOG_TZD. The other problem was due to a lack of good regex in a couple of my grep commands, more specifically, grep -v "". To which the remedy, grep ".", worked quite nicely. I'm not sure what I'll do about my use of date "+%z", yet. It would be nice if there was a more portable way to detect the timezone. The new regex for the grep commands should prove to be more portable.