Question

I have page where where I list all comments for a post. Next to each comment I have a time value in full format including the date/time (2010-01-02 11:11:20).

I know that I can format it in PHP before displaying it, so it shows;

posted 40 secs ago 
posted 5 days ago

but that would not be efficient as I am going to cache the page once it is generated.

On SO I see that they have some kind of java script for showing it, so it is run on the browser of the client:

alt text http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/5442/35118769.png

So basically I need a java script that runs on the browser that would instead of showing my date/time show “posted 4 hours ago”. All help is welcome.

Answer 1

Sounds you want this: timeago: a jQuery plugin.

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").

I quote further:

• 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.

So it should fit your needs.