[aprssig] Time stamps on FINDU pages?

[Tapio Sokura]

Steve Dimse wrote:
> nothing to the presentation of the data. The only thing I would consider 
> adding is a javascript clock that  kept counting the age of the data, 
> for example, on the find page where it says last report "2 minutes and 8 
> seconds ago". If someone produced a script that accepts the timestamp of 

You can see an example of this done with javascript at 
http://www.oh2kku.ham.fi/karttaframe/oh2kku (replace the last part with 
an aprs object/item/callsign in Finland). The page is in Finnish, but 
the javascript code is visible in the source and should be almost 
self-explanatory. I'm not sure if vintage browsers support this, at 
least it seems to work in Mozilla 1.6, MSIE 6 and Opera 7.54.

The constants in startage() are filled-in by the server when generating 
the page. pageloadtime is the current time in unix timestamp * 1000 and 
the plain number when setting the object time is the age of the object 
in milliseconds. The math is done this way so it doesn't depend on the 
user's clock being right. It does fail if the user for one reason or 
another radically changes the time on his computer after the page is 
loaded. The running of the script is triggered by the body onload 
-structure. To keep it running, the update function has to be scheduled 
to run again after every callback. The part on the page that is updated 
by the script is surrounded by span-tags so it can be uniquely 
identified. If the user has disabled javascript on his browser, the age 
of the object on the page just doesn't change. I guess it would be 
better to change the display so that if javascript is disabled, you can 
clearly notice that the age does not update without refreshing the page 
(when looking at old objects).

   Tapio