# timeago

## a jQuery plugin

### What?

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"). Download, view the examples, and enjoy.

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Ryan was born Dec 18, 1978.

### Why?

Timeago was originally built for use with Yarp.com to timestamp comments.

- 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.
- You get to use standard HTML5 tags.

### How?

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:

    jQuery(document).ready(function() {
      jQuery("time.timeago").timeago();
    });

This will turn all `time` elements with a class of `timeago` and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the datetime:

    <time class="timeago" datetime="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">July 17, 2008</time>

into something like this:

    <time class="timeago" datetime="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z" title="July 17, 2008">time ago</time>

which yields: July 17, 2008. As time passes, the timestamps will automatically update.

You can also use it programmatically:

    jQuery.timeago(new Date());             //=> ""
    jQuery.timeago("2008-07-17");           //=> ""
    jQuery.timeago(jQuery("time#some_id")); //=> ""     // [title="2008-07-20"]

To support timestamps in the future, use the `allowFuture` setting:

    jQuery.timeago.settings.allowFuture = true;

To disable timestamps in the past, use the `allowPast` setting. This setting is set to true by default. When set to false, if the time is in the past then instead of displaying a message like "5 minutes ago" a static message will be displayed. The static message displayed can be configured with the `strings.inPast` setting:

    jQuery.timeago.settings.strings.inPast = "time has elapsed";
    jQuery.timeago.settings.allowPast = false;

### Excusez-moi?

Yes, timeago has locale/i18n/language support. Here are some configuration examples. Please submit a GitHub pull request for corrections or additional languages.

### Where?

Download the "stable" release.

The code is hosted on GitHub: http://github.com/rmm5t/jquery-timeago. Go on, live on the edge.

### Who?

Timeago was built by Ryan McGeary (@rmm5t) while standing on the shoulders of giants. John Resig wrote about a similar approach. The verbiage was based on the `distance_of_time_in_words` ActionView helper in Ruby on Rails.

### When?

Timeago was conceived on July 17, 2008. (Yup, that's powered by timeago too)

### What else?

The HTML5 `time` tag is strongly recommended, but the legacy datetime microformat using the `abbr` tag ( or any other HTML element ) is also supported:

    <abbr class="timeago" title="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">July 17, 2008</abbr>

Attach timeago like so:

    jQuery(document).ready(function() {
      jQuery("abbr.timeago").timeago();
    });

Are you concerned about time zone support? Don't be. Timeago handles this too. As long as your timestamps are in ISO 8601 format and include a full time zone designator (±hhmm), everything should work out of the box regardless of the time zone that your visitors live in.

### Huh?

Need a Rails helper to make those fancy microformat `time` tags? Fine, here ya go:

    def timeago(time, options = {})
      options[:class] ||= "timeago"
      content_tag(:time, time.to_s, options.merge(datetime: time.getutc.iso8601)) if time
    end

### Do you use Timeago?

Great! Please add your site to the list of Sites that use Timeago.

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