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") from ISO 8601
formatted dates and times embedded in your HTML (à la microformats).
Usage
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 - put this in the head
section:
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
$("time.timeago").timeago();
});
</script>
This will turn all <time> elements with a class of timeago and a
datetime attribute formatted according to the
ISO 8601 standard:
<time class="timeago" datetime="2011-12-17T09:24:17Z">December 17, 2011</time>
into something like this:
<time class="timeago" datetime="2011-12-17T09:24:17Z" title="December 17, 2011">about 1 day ago</time>
<abbr> elements (or any other HTML elements) are also supported (this is for
legacy microformat support
and was originally supported by the library before the time element was
introduced to HTML5):
<abbr class="timeago" title="2011-12-17T09:24:17Z">December 17, 2011</abbr>
As time passes, the timestamps will automatically update.
If you want to update a timestamp programatically later, call the update
function with a new ISO8601 timestamp of Date object. For example:
$("time#some_id").timeago("update", "2013-12-17T09:24:17Z");
// or
$("time#some_id").timeago("update", new Date());
For more usage and examples: http://timeago.yarp.com/
For different language configurations: visit the locales directory.
Settings
cutoff : Return the original date if time distance is older than cutoff (miliseconds).
// Display original dates older than 24 hours
jQuery.timeago.settings.cutoff = 1000*60*60*24;