Inserting 'how long ago' time format

Tim_Silva

Hi,

I've noticed that many news sites are now telling how long ago the newspiece was inserted into the database. Things like, "9 hours ago" or "5 hours, 47 seconds ago". One of them even gives it in nanoseconds. I am thinking of doing something similar and would appreciate your help.

As always, thank you folks so much for your constant support in my projects.

Tim

This is my current simplified code:

<?php

$hostname="someserver.net";
$username="someusername";
$password="somepassword";
$dbname="someusername";
$usertable="sometable";
$id=$_GET['id'];

mysql_connect($hostname,$username,$password) or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("$dbname") or die(mysql_error());

$data = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $usertable WHERE id=$id")
or die(mysql_error());
$info = mysql_fetch_array( $data );

echo "<h1><p>" .$info['title']. "</h1></p>";
echo nl2br($info['content']);

?>

Blulagoon

There are two ways to do this, using either the unix time stamp or the mysql time stamp.

Add an extra field to your news table, so that when you enter a new story you also enter the time when the item was entered.

Then you get the current time when the user displays that page, subtract from it the time in the database table, and you have the difference in time.

You can leave this in seconds, or you can play around with it to give hours and minutes as well.

HTH - Blu

Tim_Silva

Blu,

Couldn't this 'time' be entered automatically into the database, some sort of timestamp?

Tim

Blulagoon

thats what I meant, you'd use an insert statement a bit like this:

insert into my_table (title,story,time) values ('my title','my story',now())

Hope this helps - Blu