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).

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:

<pre>
  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery('abbr.timeago').timeago();
  });
</pre>

This will turn all abbr elements with a class of timeago and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the title:

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

into something like this:

<abbr class="timeago" title="July 17, 2008">about 1 day ago</abbr>

As time passes, the timestamps will automatically update.

For more usage and examples: http://timeago.yarp.com/

For different language configurations: http://gist.github.com/6251

Ryan McGeary (@rmm5t)

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2008-2009, Ryan McGeary (ryanonjavascript -[at]- mcgeary [dot] org)