timeago

a jQuery plugin

What?

Timeago is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to support automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago"). Download, view the examples, and enjoy.

Whoah, whoah, whoah. You see the irony here, don't you? You're looking for a jQuery plugin, yet you surf the Internet with JavaScript turned off. This confuses the Interwebs. Afterall, there might be some useful demos and such that you could enjoy, but instead, you're wasting your time reading this. I'm so sorry.

You opened this page when you opened the page. (This will update every minute. Wait for it.)

This page was last modified sometime before now [browser might not support document.lastModified].

Ryan was born Dec 18, 1978.

Why?

Timeago was originally built for use with Yarp.com to timestamp comments.

Avoid timestamps dated "1 minute ago" even though the page was opened 10 minutes ago; timeago refreshes automatically.
You can take full advantage of page caching in your web applications, because the timestamps aren't calculated on the server.
You get to use microformats like the cool kids.

How?

First, load jQuery and the plugin:

<script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.timeago.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now, let's attach it to your timestamps on DOM ready:

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
  jQuery("abbr.timeago").timeago();
});

This will turn all abbr elements with a class of timeago and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the title:

<abbr class="timeago" title="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">July 17, 2008</abbr>

into something like this:

<abbr class="timeago" title="July 17, 2008">time ago</abbr>

which yields: July 17, 2008. As time passes, the timestamps will automatically update.

You can also use it programmatically:

jQuery.timeago(new Date());             //=> ""
jQuery.timeago("2008-07-17");           //=> ""
jQuery.timeago(jQuery("abbr#some_id")); //=> ""     // [title="2008-07-20"]

To support timestamps in the future, use the allowFuture setting:

jQuery.timeago.settings.allowFuture = true;

Excusez-moi?

Yes, timeago has locale/i18n/language support. Here are some configuration examples. Please submit a GitHub pull request for corrections or additional languages.

Where?

Download the "stable" release.

The code is hosted on GitHub: http://github.com/rmm5t/jquery-timeago. Go on, live on the edge.

Who?

Timeago was built by Ryan McGeary (@rmm5t) while standing on the shoulders of giants. John Resig wrote about a similar approach. The verbiage was based on the distance_of_time_in_words ActionView helper in Ruby on Rails.

When?

Timeago was conceived on July 17, 2008. (Yup, that's powered by timeago too)

What else?

HTML5 has a new time tag and timeago supports it too.

<time class="timeago" datetime="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">July 17, 2008</time>

Attach timeago like so:

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
  jQuery("time.timeago").timeago();
});

Are you concerned about time zone support? Don't be. Timeago handles this too. As long as your timestamps are in ISO 8601 format and include a full time zone designator (±hhmm), everything should work out of the box regardless of the time zone that your visitors live in.

Huh?

Need a Rails helper to make those fancy microformat abbr tags? Fine, here ya go:

def timeago(time, options = {})
  options[:class] ||= "timeago"
  content_tag(:abbr, time.to_s, options.merge(:title => time.getutc.iso8601)) if time
end