Counting the “Ago” Time: How to Keep Publish Dates Fresh

It’s common to present dates on the Web in a format such as Published on September 12th, 2015, or 09/12/2015, 09:41:23 and 2015-09-12.

Each of these examples tells the full date and/or time of some kind of activity – be it a published article, or a reader comment, or perhaps an uploaded video.

Date formats like this might seem perfectly reasonable. After all, they’re informative and human-readable! Well yes, but “human-readable” doesn’t necessary mean users will readily be able to understand how recently the activity has occurred. The Web is a fast-moving place, and giving your content a sense of freshness could be the key to engaging with your audience! So, let’s look at how we could improve on these common date formats.

A Little Trick

Once again, let’s say you have stumbled on a post that was actually published just a couple of minutes ago, but the subheading of the post states this:

Published on September 12th, 2016

… or this:

Published on 2016-09-12, 09:41:23

The problem with these messages is that they don’t communicate the feeling that your website has just been updated or that you do that very often. So, surely it be more inviting – and much clearer – to present the time this way:

Published 2 minutes ago

Seen this many times before? But how many of you have built this into your projects? Take Facebook for example: what would it look like if they presented the dates for the latest content as in my first example? Compare the left and right columns in the following image:

The left column’s dates aren’t that attractive, are they? I’ll wager the right hand examples are more appealing to you. Knowing that the content is fresh is very important – especially on the social networks, where people are more likely to ignore content that’s old or not clearly timestamped.

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by Osvaldas Valutis via SitePoint