jQuery Clockwinder

Clockwinder is a simple jQuery plugin for displaying relative times in web applications. Using Clockwinder, you can easily provide relative times (e.g. 10 minutes ago) purely using Javascript. Essentially, Clockwinder encapsulates the functionality of Rails's time_ago_in_words in Javascript with convenience methods for automatically keeping things up to date. The actual time_ago_in_words Javascript code came from this blog post.

Usage

Simply add the Clockwinder javascript to your project somewhere and include it in your page (after jQuery):

<script src="/javascripts/jquery.clockwinder.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

Then call it on whatever elements you want to be kept up to date. By default, it will take the contents of the datetime attribute on the specified elements and use that as a basis for the relative time.

// Apply Clockwinder to all <time> tags with a 'relative' class
$('time.relative').clockwinder();

Now load the page and watch the times update themselves!

Options

Call via $(element).clockwinder({ /* Options here... */})

• postfix: The postfix is what will be appended to the relative time text. Defaults to 'ago'.
• displayFunction: If you wish to display the time in a custom way, this function will be called each time the time is updated with this scoped to the element that's being updated and arguments of newTime (the newest time string calculated) and options (the options that were passed to Clockwinder).
• interval: Specify how often Clockwinder updates times (in milliseconds). Defaults to 30 seconds.