Comments on: Give Your Visitors a Rough Time

By: franglix

franglix — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:59:32 +0000

I think it’s a nice idea, gives a rather relaxed tone – perhaps ideal for a blog. I will give it a try… Thanks.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:15:32 +0000

A rough time is often really handy, but while we’re all for approximations I find relative times are even more helpful – e.g. “three hours ago”, “twenty minutes ago”, “yesterday”. Gmail does this a lot, and it really helps when working with threaded lists of messages (e.g. emails, forum posts, even comments like these). I put together a little script that achieves the basics of this — see my post on relative times in PHP for more details.

By: Anonymously

Anonymously — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:28:59 +0000

Nice idea but just how helpful is it?

I get the idea that it’s just going to confuse, maybe even scare the hell out of your visitors. Maybe you have forgotten the reasons behind displaying the date and time in a set format?

It’s because it is uniform, it can be read and understood by just about every living person on the planet, no? Now your suggesting this approach?

The Dr.

By: captain grammar

captain grammar — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:11:08 +0000

neat script.

I have one improvement:

change:
echo ‘Its ‘.$roughTime;

to:
echo ‘It\’s ‘.$roughTime;

By: jc

jc — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:05:41 +0000

I would argue it takes more effort to think through someone verbally saying “12:24:13 AM” than someone saying “nearly twelve thirty”, and it takes more effort to read and think through “nearly twelve thirty” than “12:24 PM”

By: brent5392

brent5392 — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:09:29 +0000

I like it, I really do =P
May very well use it in the future.
Maybe it might be a good idea just to include the time (hours and minutes) after it just for anyone who would like to know the exact time. Keeps everyone happy =)

By: mattymcg

mattymcg — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:04:01 +0000

@Joshua Paine: Paul was only able to edit his comment because he’s an admin. I updated yours — yes, we know, the blog comment system is less than optimal.

@Toby: Nice one. Obviously not appropriate in every instance, but there are probably a few places here on SitePoint where it might be worth considering.

By: Stormrider

Stormrider — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:06:55 +0000

Nice idea. The division of the hour is strange though. It is ‘just gone x’ right up until 14 minutes past, but only at 15 minutes past do you get ‘quarter past x’. Then on the other side, is ‘quarter to x+1′ from 40 to 50 minutes past.

By: Joshua Paine

Joshua Paine — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:37:00 +0000

I swear I’ve been able to edit comments on here before, and Paul obviously did, but I can’t seem to get back in to my message to fix the code formatting or correct my JavaScript-style array creation. (Obviously it should have been array(’twelve’,'one’…).)

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:21:28 +0000

I'm not much of a golfer, but you could save yourself a few lines like so... :)


function numberToWord($number)
{
	$numbers = array(null, 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six',
		'seven', 'eight', 'nine', 'ten', 'eleven', 'twelve', 'one');
	return isset($numbers[$number]) ? $numbers[$number] : 'twelve';
}

Edit: beaten to it by Joshua