Daily Archives: April 8, 2013

Fuzzy timestamps

I never thought about it until now, but the concept of fuzzy timestamps is a little more complex than it appears at first blush. How hard is it to make a timestamp fuzzy?


a minute ago
1 minute ago
2 minutes ago
an hour ago
about an hour ago
1 hour ago
5 hours ago
and so on...

The question is which convention do you stick to for each measure of time? Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years all could have their own unique phrases. And once you settle on figuring out what the convention is that you want to pick, the next, bigger challenge, is how do you support l10n?

Some languages have sentence structures that are different from English so you need to be flexible enough to be able to hopefully support that.

It turns out that there’s a jQuery plugin that has taken a pretty good stab at it called smart-time-ago which is an optimized fork of timeago.

What makes this sort of cool is that the presentation of your fuzzy timestamp is delegated to the browser so the server is agnostic of all of these variations…at least, I think it’s cool. Maybe some back end developers would prefer that all of this presentation logic is kept at the server.

Either way, this project is a good starting point for those who want to tackle on the challenge of presenting fuzzy timestamps. I’m not sure if I completely agree with all of the units of time that the plugin presents, but it gives you a good start to where you want to go.

Fixing jslint and jshint errors

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 7.53.22 AM

Anytime you write JavaScript code, you should lint your code. Linting code helps you write better JavaScript code. Linters are a form of static code analysis which will scan through your code and identify potential problems that it may find in your code.

The transition from going from not linting your code at all to writing code that is lint-free is a bit of struggle at first. What do all of these linting errors mean? Sometime I will end up having to google what a particular lint error means and how to fix it.

Well, those days are gone thanks to JSLint Error Explanations. They even have sample code which demonstrates the linting error and tells you hot to fix it. Pretty nice.

The only annoying thing about the site is the “Fork me in GitHub ribbon” on the upper right that is fixed in that corner even if you scroll.

Speaking of linting, I also highly recommend Google Closure’s linter. It comes with a tool that will automatically fix style issues that it finds for you. Very handy and easy to use, though the install is a little bit of a pain.

And lastly, for Sublime Text Editor users, if you want to use multiple linting engines on the fly with the excellent SublimeLinter package, you can check out my fork of the SublimeLinter that calls multiple engines instead of just one.