A lightweight and ultra-performant jQuery plugin that tells you how many minutes there are left to read in a piece of text. Check out the demo and send me love.

• Get the latest release my downloading the master branch or by running bower install reading-time-left
• Copy or link to either readingTimeLeft.js or readingTimeLeft.min.js from the lib folder to your folder containing your scripts
• Add it after you include jQuery
• You're ready to go!

$('#my-container').readingTimeLeft({ options... })

$('#my-container')
  .readingTimeLeft()
  .on('timechange', function(e, minutesLeft) {

    console.log(minutesLeft);
    // => 3.453984726

    var text;
    if (minutesLeft < 1) {
      text = 'less than 1 min'
    } else {
      text = Math.round(minutesLeft) + ' min';
    }

    window.document.title = text;
    // => 3 minutes left

  });

This will update the document title to the amount of time left to read in realtime.

readingTimeLeft() can be customized with three options:

stepSelector: what type of children to look for in the container.
wordsPerMinute: how many wpm we are expecting the user to read at.
eventName: the name of the event that will be triggered on the container. It is also appended as a namespace for the scroll and resize events bound on window.

• stepSelector defaults to *
• wordsPerMinute defaults to 270
• eventName defaults to timechange

$('#my-container').readingTimeLeft({
  // Will only select <p> and <blockquote> children
  stepSelector: 'p, blockquote',
  // Consider 400 words per minute of reading time
  wordsPerMinute: 400,
  // Trigger an event named “minutesleft”
  eventName: "minutesleft"
}).on('minutesleft', function (e, minutesLeft) {
  console.log(minutesLeft);
});

To destroy an instance of readingTimeLeft(), call:

  $('#my-container').trigger('destroy.readingTimeLeft');

This will remove the data attributes on the children, plus the scroll and resize event on window.

Chrome, Firefox 3.0+, IE6+, Safari 4.0+, Opera 10.0+

1.0

• Initial release