I think the time is UTC, and you can get it by a simple API call, directly from steemit.com. For example, this post data can be seen following this URL, where I only added ".json" to it:

https://steemit.com/photography/@dragosroua/foggy-evening-in-a-quiet-park.json

The property that says the time of the post is "created":

"created":"2018-03-06T18:56:12"

So you only add ".json" at the end of an URL (taken from the user's blog feed) and you get all the fancy stuff.

Hope this helps :)