Question

What i’m trying to do is show date in more readable format like 3 seconds ago, 1 hours ago, yesterday, June 12 and etc.
What i did is , first calculate the timestamp for comment’s date.. Then send it to client with ajax, then create two date instance on javascript one for is comment’s date and other one is current date.. After that I just find differences between to date item then write on the screen with fancy words..
Everything works fine on localhost, even server.. But sometimes if client’s pc date is earlier from the server date (independent from time zone)..
Let say server time is today 13.30 pm and client time is today 13.00 , it’s failing with this scenario because current time is being comment’s post time.. Difference will be negative value..
I’m creating date object for comment in php like this;

date("Y-m-d G:i:s")

Then write it to mysql db..
After that when i select comments i convert it to timestamp to push it on client side with ;

$comment['timestamp'] = strtotime($row['creationDate']);

And then in javascript, I make calculation for human readable date format ;

DateObject.getFormatted = function(unixtime){

d = new Date(unixtime*1000);
now = new Date();

var diff = (now.getTime()/1000- unixtime) ;
var result = "";

var MIN = 60,
    HOUR = 3600,
    DAY = 86400;

if(diff < 2)
    result ="just now";
else if(diff < MIN)
    result = Math.floor(diff) + " seconds ago";
else if(diff < HOUR)
    result = Math.floor(diff/60) + " minutes ago"; 
else if(diff < DAY)
    result = Math.floor(diff/3600) + " hours ago";
else if(diff < DAY*3)
{   
    var days = diff/DAY;
    if(days < 2)
        result = "yesterday";
    else
        result = Math.floor(days) + " days ago"; 
}
else if(now.getFullYear() == d.getFullYear())
{
    formattedTime = this.getTime(d);
    result = this.getSameYear(d) + " at " + formattedTime;
}
else
{
    formattedDate = this.getDate(d); 
    formattedTime = this.getTime(d);
    result = formattedDate + " at " + formattedTime;
}       

return result;




};

So if clients date is earlier then the comment’s date diff value is being negative, so the first case would be true

if(diff < 2)
result ="just now";

It’s going behing as time difference between client and comment’s date .. In my case 10 minutes.. If I set my computer time 10 minutes later it’s working nice..
So how can i fix it in a better way?

Thank you.

Answer 1

May be better send from server to client difference between comment date and current date?(instead of creation two javascript date instances)