Programming with Poise

Fuzzy Time

Recently I discovered a need (read: desire that was relatively easily fulfilled, thus necessary) for a web app to have “fuzzy time” display capabilities. You’ve got the ironclad, all-superior, well-known, never-fail Unix timestamp (e.g. 1126935037). Backbone of a LOT software (and for good reason), but useless for display. You’ve got the MySQL datetime, which is really nifty, but even for seasoned developers, can be a bit harsh on the eyes. PHP is the winner by far. With it’s function called date(), you can print strings like “Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:21am” which is much nicer. Isn’t abstraction wonderful?

Let’s unpack this. In each instance you’re moving away from a single, absolute integer, to an easier-on-the-eyes formatted string. But why stop there? That’s where “fuzzy time” functions come into play. They take a given time value (timestamp, datetime, or something to that effect) and, with some very simple logic… lay it out in a much easier-to-swallow way, such as “today at 8:16am,” “yesterday around 1:30pm,” and “about two weeks ago.” A buddy of mine used to have a fuzzy time widget for his (Fedora) desktop that ran the gambit, abstracting time as specifically as “early morning” to as generally as “early winter.” Perhaps that’s going too far, perhaps not. You be the judge - I thought it was pretty funny.

Back to the topic at hand. I’ve always admired Facebook’s use of fuzzy time for status updates.

At certain times of day and night (and certain levels of non-sobriety) your users can’t even parse some of the nicest date() output. So, I went ahead and wrote a very simple PHP function to take things just one level higher up the ole’ abstraction ladder. (Note that line 2 only existed in my example script to save me typing.)

function fuzzy_time( $time ) {
  echo "\"$time\" is: ";
  if ( ( $time = strtotime( $time ) ) == false ) {
    return 'an unknown time';
  }
  define( 'NOW',        time() );
  define( 'ONE_MINUTE', 60 );
  define( 'ONE_HOUR',   3600 );
  define( 'ONE_DAY',    86400 );
  define( 'ONE_WEEK',   ONE_DAY*7 );
  define( 'ONE_MONTH',  ONE_WEEK*4 );
  define( 'ONE_YEAR',   ONE_MONTH*12 );
 
  // sod = start of day :)
  $sod = mktime( 0, 0, 0, date( 'm', $time ), date( 'd', $time ), date( 'Y', $time ) );
  $sod_now = mktime( 0, 0, 0, date( 'm', NOW ), date( 'd', NOW ), date( 'Y', NOW ) );
 
  // used to convert numbers to strings
  $convert = array( 1 => 'one', 2 => 'two', 3 => 'three', 4 => 'four', 5 => 'five', 6 => 'six', 7 => 'seven', 8 => 'eight', 9 => 'nine', 10 => 'ten', 11 => 'eleven' );
 
  // today
  if ( $sod_now == $sod ) {
    if ( $time > NOW-(ONE_MINUTE*3) ) {
      return 'just a moment ago';
    } else if ( $time > NOW-(ONE_MINUTE*7) ) {
      return 'a few minutes ago';
    } else if ( $time > NOW-(ONE_HOUR) ) {
      return 'less than an hour ago';
    }
    return 'today at ' . date( 'g:ia', $time );
  }
 
  // yesterday
  if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < = ONE_DAY ) {
    if ( date( 'i', $time ) > (ONE_MINUTE+30) ) {
      $time += ONE_HOUR/2;
    }
    return 'yesterday around ' . date( 'ga', $time );
  }
 
  // within the last 5 days
  if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < = (ONE_DAY*5) ) {
    $str = date( 'l', $time );
    $hour = date( 'G', $time );
    if ( $hour < 12 ) {
      $str .= ' morning';
    } else if ( $hour < 17 ) {
      $str .= ' afternoon';
    } else if ( $hour < 20 ) {
      $str .= ' evening';
    } else {
      $str .= ' night';
    }
    return $str;
  }
 
  // number of weeks (between 1 and 3)...
  if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < (ONE_WEEK*3.5) ) {
    if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < (ONE_WEEK*1.5) ) {
      return 'about a week ago';
    } else if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < (ONE_DAY*2.5) ) {
      return 'about two weeks ago';
    } else {
      return 'about three weeks ago';
    }
  }
 
  // number of months (between 1 and 11)...
  if ( ($sod_now-$sod) < (ONE_MONTH*11.5) ) {
    for ( $i = (ONE_WEEK*3.5), $m=0; $i < ONE_YEAR; $i += ONE_MONTH, $m++ ) {
      if ( ($sod_now-$sod) <= $i ) {
        return 'about ' . $convert[$m] . ' month' . (($m>1)?'s':'') . ' ago';
      }
    }
  }
 
  // number of years...
  for ( $i = (ONE_MONTH*11.5), $y=0; $i < (ONE_YEAR*10); $i += ONE_YEAR, $y++ ) {
    if ( ($sod_now-$sod) <= $i ) {
      return 'about ' . $convert[$y] . ' year' . (($y>1)?'s':'') . ' ago';
    }
  }
 
  // more than ten years...
  return 'more than ten years ago';
}

The original base-function I used was one that I found on PHPClasses by a fellow named Andrew Collington. The code was in a class method for getting fuzzy file times. I took that code, broke it out into a function, and massaged the heck out of it. The function takes as it’s first parameter any value accepted by the PHP function strtotime(). I chose that because of it’s impressive flexibility. The function I ended up with only goes back to a ten-year period. I figure, if I ever write anything that has records older than that, I can update it pretty easily. Here’s sample output for all of the different intervals the function currently supports:

"now" is: just a moment ago "-5 minutes" is: a few minutes ago "-30 minutes" is: less than an hour ago "-24 hours" is: yesterday around 10am "-48 hours" is: Saturday morning "-90 hours" is: Thursday afternoon "-1 week" is: about a week ago "-2 weeks" is: about three weeks ago "-3 weeks" is: about three weeks ago "-4 weeks" is: about one month ago "-5 weeks" is: about one month ago "-3 months" is: about three months ago "-9 months" is: about nine months ago "-13 months" is: about one year ago "-76 months" is: about six years ago "-9 years" is: about nine years ago "-26 years" is: more than ten years ago

I was suprised at how much character and youth it gave the site. Thanks Andrew and Facebook!

November 17 2008 | Communication and Development | No Comments »

Webstraction

My new foray into web development has been bolstered substantially by using jQuery for any client-side scripting needs. However, I’ve also been using a new server-side tool in my belt. I call it Webstraction… it’s a web development not-framework I’ve recently built.

I like the idea of web development abstractions. That’s what CakePHP, symfony, and Rails all are, at a very high level. They are systems which take care of lower-level grunt work for you, and free up your time to focus on site/application design, rather than the nitty gritty technical details of the actual programming itself. All basically serve to answer the same cry: I don’t want to write the same code more than once. For example, header logic that checks to see if the user is logged in, footer markup that displays links at the bottom of the page, left hand navigation, etc. You place the code for these in certain places, and then you include them where you need them.

Taking it a step further, many of these tools can actually automatically handle including the code for you - provided you put it in the right places, name it the right name, use it in the right fashion, and only need it in certain circumstances. Many of these frameworks will actually write code for you, if you take the time to learn their system.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with learning one of these systems, and then leveraging it to quickly churn out product. However, I take issue with them for a single reason. Say I commit hours, weeks, whatever, to learning Rails. To really learning Rails, and being beyond proficient with it. And then I spend the time to use it for several sites. What happens to the first site where I want to step outside of the Rails paradigm? Do something that it doesn’t support? Do something that goes against it’s main function?

It breaks, or you break. Either you have to go then into the Rails core code, and start hacking it up (making upgrading to newer versions highly time-consuming, if not impossible in some cases), or you have to break down, and give up your dream (or find a compromise to make it happen). All of these solutions are, to me, a bit unsavory.

What would really be nice, is a system that let you do what you do, but didn’t tell you how to go about it. Offered you a set of tools that made you more productive, but didn’t get in your way when you wanted to go and do something non-standard. That’s where Webstraction comes into play. Webstraction provides standard methodologies for building web pages and accessing common code. It is an abstraction in that, many times, the logical flow of page creation depends merely upon the existence or absence of a given file or directory. It provides a really smooth interface for having the system automatically grab all necessary php, css, and javascript files for you. Webstraction also has special handlers for Ajax requests. And, most currently, I’m in the process of redeveloping it to support plug-ins (which seem, on today’s web, to be an expectation (Just look at the communities around Firefox, jQuery, and Wordpress, for instance).

I’ve submitted the project to SourceForge with a GNU/GPL license, and a recent version is available for download there, however I’ve not yet completed the documentation site, nor have I migrated the Subversion repository. More updates to follow.

October 29 2008 | Development and Web | No Comments »

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