Natural language dates in ruby/rails?

Question

I need to show natural dates like

1. "few seconds ago"
2. "21 minutes ago"

Is there something built in to the rails? Or may be third party? This is not hard to implement, but I do not want to invent the wheel.

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is time_ago_in_words

Answer 2

Also check out the chronic gem

http://chronic.rubyforge.org/

Answer 3

An interesting approach to consider is doing time-to-word conversion on the client side with javascript. This can keep your pages cacheable while still presenting relative times to the end user.

Darragh Curran has released a javascript implementation of just such functionality and written up a short explanation of how to use it in a Rails application.

Another interesting advantage of this technique is that you can dynamically update the description of the time without the user leaving the page.