Do you also hate date strings on blogs that are way too accurate? Does it help if you know that User X gave his comment exactly on Wed, Jan 17, 2008 13:34:20 (maybe even showing milliseconds)? Well, I thought this does not really matter, so like I’ve seen it elsewhere my new blog will also use these ‘friendly dates’.
The basic idea is that the reader will see the comments relative to the blog post timestamp. So knowing the time the post was added to the blog together with the days/hours/minutes from that point in time is enough and actually easier to understand. In the picture left you can see how a comment that was added a few minutes later really reads as ‘A few minutes later, Person X wrote…’. I might also simplify hours and days, but for now I kept hours/days/minutes accurate. I dropped the seconds as that is just not interesting and it hardly makes sense.
