

Smart Time Ago: a new JS lib to update relative timestamps more efficiently - poshboytl
http://blog.pragmatic.ly/we-opened-source-smart-time-ago

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MichaelApproved
This is such a minor tweak that I can't see how it's worth trouble of
downloading even a byte of extra code to get it done.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: "minor tweak" in terms of efficiency. The processing power saved by
making it "smart" is probably less than what it takes to download the extra
code.

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yehanyin
It depends on the application itself. For pages which user will only stay for
few minutes, no much more efficiency gained. But for realtime apps which user
will keep the page open for hours/days, it will improve a lot. And for apps
which have more read than write, it will also improve a lot. BTW, I'm not sure
whether I catch you about the "extra code". It's a replacement with less than
1KB difference in size.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Even 1kb seems like too much. The processing power to handle the time ago
logic is so small, having to download 1kb of data more probably takes more
processing power than you're saving.

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taude
The regular timeago is on Github: <https://github.com/rmm5t/jquery-timeago>.

I don't see the need for a new project for something like a tweak like this.
Seems like a reasonable pull request for the timeago folks???

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poshboytl
Yup. Ryan did a great job on the timeago lib. We have ever discussed about the
pull request but finally find that we changed lots of the logic about how to
deal with the relative timestamp. So we started a new one to give an optional
choice.

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NelsonMinar
Javascript relative time displays have hilarious results if the web browser's
clock is set incorrectly. That's mostly not a modern problem thanks to NTP
being baked into modern consumer OSes but it can be terribly confusing if you
have a misconfigured client.

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saurik
The simple solution to this is that the server sends a reference time along
with the timestamps: when the page loads you calculate the drift from the
local time to the reference time, and then adjust local time to server time
when you update relative timestamps.

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latchkey
I just use <http://momentjs.com/>

Does timeago (with localizations) and more in one tiny library.

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yehanyin
It's different. While momentjs focus on date parsing, manipulating and
formatting, smart-time-ago is the lib to update the relative timestamps in
time on the page.

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latchkey
Moment does both functions and 99% of the time that you're working with dates
in an app, you're going to need both. Also, Moment is localized and has a
fairly large community around it. The world doesn't need yet another timeago.

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combataircraft
you guys might be interested at this; <https://github.com/azer/relative-date>

~~~
poshboytl
It looks interesting. Thanks for the info. Just watched. :D

