timestamping a article

cez

When visiting some news sites you see with the posting of a article, a message display saying article posted 3 hours and 23 minutes ago for example and everytime when the page is reloaded or is refreshed the time changes.

How can such a thing be done?
anyone?

kburger

Use a UNIX timestamp. Then you know how many seconds since Jan. 1, 1970 it was when the article was posted, and you know the timestamp of right now. Subtract the two. PHP has some useful functions for converting those timestamps into a human readable format -- like strtotime(), date(), etc.

drew010

seemed like something i could use on my site so I made a quick function...

<?php

$time = strtotime("April 15th 1985 20:30:00 PST");

echo elapsed($time);


function elapsed($time)
{
	$days = 0;
	$hours = 0;
	$minutes = 0;
	$seconds = 0;

$passed = time() - $time;

while($passed - 86400 >= 0) {
	++$days;
	$passed -= 86400;
}

while($passed - 3600 >= 0) {
	++$hours;
	$passed -= 3600;
}

while($passed - 60 >= 0) {
	++$minutes;
	$passed -= 60;
}

$seconds = $passed;

$ret = "";

if ($days > 0) {
	$str .= "$days days, ";
}

if ($hours > 0) {
	$str .= "$hours hours and ";
}

$str .= "$minutes minutes ago";

return $str;
}

?>

runs pretty quickly for smaller intervals, took 0.222 seconds to run the function for my birthdate (20 years ago). only 0.02 seconds for 1 1/4 years ago. may be a faster way but thats what i got.

edit: runs a lot faster on large times if you added a while loop to handle years. reduced time for my birthdate from 0.222 seconds to 0.011 seconds.

kburger

Very nice, drew. I'll keep that function in mind. Very useful.

One little thing I noticed, though. I think you meant $str = ""; instead of $ret = "";

drew010

heh good catch. i sure did.

cez

kburger wrote:

Use a UNIX timestamp. Then you know how many seconds since Jan. 1, 1970 it was when the article was posted, and you know the timestamp of right now. Subtract the two. PHP has some useful functions for converting those timestamps into a human readable format -- like strtotime(), date(), etc.

When using the date Jan. 1, 1970, you can not have a correct display of when the message was posted right? because the posting is not been done in 1970, excuse if this sounds stupid, but i am very new to this and this doesn't sound logical to me.

So apart of the minor correction that kburger pointed out i could use this script?, do i have to place this in the webpage or on the server side?
And i would need to change the date that you put in at first in the current time that the article is going to be placed right?
So then i would place this script if it is going to be placed on the page itself in the body then?
Sorry for all the questions? but sometimes with every answer a new question comes up, thanks for the feedback guys!! 🆒

leatherback

Hi,

have a look at the manual for fmod which gave me this:

User Contributed Notes
fmod 
Ryan Means
11-May-2005 03:15 
If your given a number of seconds and you want to turn it into Days, hours, minutes, and seconds:
(this is very useful when using the Unix Time Epoch to find the difference from one time to the other)

For Example:
I posted in a bb at one date.. when I post a Unix Time Epoch was marked..
Then When I go back and view it again 2 weeks later I generate the Unix Time Epoch for the current time. 
Then take the current time - the posting time, this gives the number of seconds since the post.
Then use the below equations to get days, hours, minutes, and seconds since the post was made:

<?PHP
$totalsec=XXXXXXX; //Replace the X's with a int value of seconds

$daysarray = explode(".", ($totalsec/86400));
$days = $daysarray[0];

$partdays = fmod($totalsec, 86400);
$hoursarray = explode(".", ($partdays/3600));
$hours = $hoursarray[0];

$parthours = fmod($partdays, 3600);
$minarray = explode(".", ($parthours/60));
$min = $minarray[0];

$sec = fmod($parthours, 60);

echo "days " . $days . "<br>";
echo "hours " . $hours . "<br>";
echo "minutes " . $min . "<br>";
echo "seconds " . $sec . "<br>";
?>

drew010

cez wrote:
kburger wrote:

When using the date Jan. 1, 1970, you can not have a correct display of when the message was posted right? because the posting is not been done in 1970, excuse if this sounds stupid, but i am very new to this and this doesn't sound logical to me.

@

So apart of the minor correction that kburger pointed out i could use this script?, do i have to place this in the webpage or on the server side?
And i would need to change the date that you put in at first in the current time that the article is going to be placed right?
So then i would place this script if it is going to be placed on the page itself in the body then?
Sorry for all the questions? but sometimes with every answer a new question comes up, thanks for the feedback guys!! 🆒

if the message is older than Jan 1 1970 it wont work right but id guess thats not the case..
its php so it has to be done server side and use it to produce html to output. I put it on my site and I just calculate the timestamp when I added a program and then did
echo elapsed($thetimestamp)
and it outputs the time passed.

kburger

leatherback wrote:
Hi,

have a look at the manual for fmod which gave me this:

Thanks leatherback. That's probably much faster.

cez

So i need to install php on my server, ok that's clear but the page itself needs also some coding right? or else how would it interact with eachother and display the posted ago message?

I know i sound very stupid asking this but i really am a newbie when it comes to this 😕 php works only if some sort of script is also imbedded with the html page right?
Could i get a link from you, to check how it works for you?

😃 i just saw your site in your public profile and checked it out, and it's EXACTLY what i want! 😃 , but at this point still confused how to get this to work for me?

Some instructions for me to do if i would have to get the same result:

1: Get a hosting with php installed
2: Put that script up you posted above
3: Maybe put something on the index.html page also

Then is my following question how do you get this message placed on exactly the article you want? and letting every article display seperate time messages?
I hope i am not annoying people with my questions :o

leatherback

Hey Cez,

Perhaps it is good to do some reading on this & the concepts. Many questions are answered inthis thread and have a look here

It takes a bit of time, but then you have some better idea of where you are headed with this stuff..

cez

Thanks for the links, very nice info and explained for the total newbie on PHP programming, some of the post i glanced over for a second really looked well written for persons like me 😃 . I will get into it a litlle deeper when my mind is up for it.

By the way is that thing that i want for my site difficult, from a scale to 1 to 10 what difficulty level could you say this particular piece of programming has?

Just curious.

leatherback

I'd say it is probably on a 1 for an experienced programmer. For a starter in PhP it is a 5. For a starter in PhP and HTML it is a 9.

Take your pick. But it is basically something you have to get used to. If you know the basics, and are willing to read & browse the site a bit, there is not much you cannot achieve by self-learning.

phphp

蝇头小字，太难看了

kburger

phphp wrote:
蝇头小字，太难看了

Excuse me?

phphp

^_
$timestamp <-----　select from database,
$time = ($time - $timestamp)