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).

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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 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.

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;

Ryan McGeary (@rmm5t)

MIT License