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.

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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="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">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. Email Ryan McGeary 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)

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