I’m a huge advocate of displaying the “Time since this was posted” for your blogs posts. On the internet, our blog audience varies from people halfway across town to strangers from halfway across the planet, all of which live by differing timezones.

Displaying the time since each blog post was made can enforce to your readers that you maintain an active blog, and provides a simple way of letting visitors know how “fresh” each post is. And with the United States using a different date format to the rest of the world, keeping track of this becomes less trivial than it should be. Plus, reading “This post was made 2 hours and 5 minutes ago” is so much more “human friendly” than “Posted 02/12/2007 at 06:30 PM”

Standard date formats are just so 1995.

If you’re running WordPress, there’s a great (in terms of, it does it’s task simply and surely) plugin called Time Since (published and popularized by the well-known Binary Bonsai, that does the trick for me. It simple terms, it subtracts the post’s date/time from the current server date/time, and outputs it in a human-readable format.