Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Time Since

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Time Since

I think I like Simon's new time since feature (you can't see it unless you go to the home page). I think I've seen similar things elsewhere but I can't remember where. It might be a little distracting on his home page since it's kind of big. But, thanks to his girlfriend Natalie for making the code available. If I can find a place to put it I may use it.

Hey, she uses the exact same type of URL scheme I do. Score.

The only reason I think the time since may not be the best idea is because it has to change every time the page loads, as opposed to the time of a post which is static. This would seriously hurt static caching. However, Simon's point that it erases the time zone distinction is a really good one. But because of the caching issue alone I don't think I'd want to use it.

My whole philosophy while developing my CMS has been that even if some things are more inefficient than they would be without the CMS, it's more important to make things easy to use, because whatever inefficiencies there are can be completely eliminated by having pages cached and served from static files.

Permalink | 3 Comments | id 3965

18:24 (utc-4)
edited: 18:28 (utc-4)

Comments

Yup the static caching thing caught me out soon after I installed it - I've had to knock the timeout on the front page down from 5 minutes to 1 minute to keep the time since thing updating properly.

If caching is an issue, a nice alternative is to generate the time_since information using javascript. With careful use of the DOM you can get the time since bit to appear in browsers that support the DOM and be silently skipped in older browsers, which isn't a problem as it's not an essntial part of the page. Hixie does this on http://ln.hixie.ch/ using some pretty funky Mozilla specific stuff.

∴ Simon Willison | 14-Jun-2003 11:30pm est | http://simon.incutio.com/ | #2193

Awesome, I'll check that out. I considered Javascript too. I've been sour on the whole client-side scripting thing in general, and especially fed up with the whole thing when I found out that you have to write to the browser in a completely different way if the page is XHTML. That was in an article by Mark Pilgrim on xml.com, I think, but I can't find it in my weblog archive.

Hehe tell me about it - when I switched my site to being served with application/xhtml ALL of my scripts stopped working on the spot! I figured out the solution the other day - you need to switch to using document.createElementNS in Mozilla but keep using document.createElement in IE. I've got a function to do just that in my blockquotes code now: http://simon.incutio.com/blockquotesNS.js

∴ Simon Willison | 15-Jun-2003 6:24am est | http://simon.incutio.com/ | #2195

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