A few minutes ago a user in the ColdFusion IRC channel asked about an ActionScript relative time script. What is a relative time script? It translates something like “December 10” to “8 days ago”. Turns out Google found a bunch of examples here. I took the first example, a JavaScript one, and rewrote it. This version is ColdFusion 8 only since it uses <, but you could change that in about 2 nanoseconds for a cf7 and earlier version. I’ll add this up to CFLib a bit later probably.

<cfscript> function relativeTime(pastdate) { var delta = dateDiff("s", pastDate, now());

if(delta < 60) {
    return "less than a minute ago";
} else if(delta < 120) {
    return "about a minute ago";
} else if(delta < (45*60)) {
    return round(delta/60) & " minutes ago";
} else if(delta < (90*60)) {
    return "about an hour ago";
} else if(delta < (24*60*60)) {
	return round(delta/3600) & " hours ago";
} else if(delta < (48*60*60)) {
    return "1 day ago";
} else {
	return round(delta/86400) & " days ago";
} } </cfscript>

<cfset pastdate = dateAdd(“n”, -9400, now())> <cfoutput>Paris had dignity #relativeTime(pastdate)#</cfoutput> </code>

I’ll update the wiki too (got to represent the ColdFusion!)