Yesterday I wrote a simple wordpress plugin that checks an rss feed and finds posts in that feed that contain specific keywords. Any posts found that are also younger than n number of days are then displayed at the top of a page just as if they were posts in the wordpress blog.
When I was display the data though I thought it would be nice if the pubdate sent with the feed actually showed up as “2 days ago…” or “4 months ago..” or whatever was applicable. Thus, I did what any good lazy coder does I googled to see if anyone had written this up in PHP already and sure enough someone had.
I found this function on the drupal support community message boards posted by someone named “drenei”
<?php
function ago($timestamp){
$difference = time() - $timestamp;
$periods = array("second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "years", "decade");
$lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10");
for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j]; $j++)
$difference /= $lengths[$j];
$difference = round($difference);
if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= "s";
$text = "$difference $periods[$j] ago";
return $text;
}
?>