15 Mar 2009
Static footers
It has become some kind of standard practice to have the phrase “Copyright [insert_current_year_here]” at the bottom of our blogs and websites, regardless of what it actually means to us or our users. Rippers and thieves know very well what copyright infringement is, so copyright statements are neither a warning or a deterrent in most cases.
Forgetting all that for a moment, what is still surprising is to see so many sites (including some well-known ones), having an outdated date on their site footers. You can see this especially around the turn of the new year. I have seen this in a few WP templates as well.
Ok, just a gentle reminder. Don’t embed the copyright year using plain html text. Use your server side scripting language (read as PHP or Ruby these days) to generate them.
In PHP, you can do it as simply as:
echo "Copyright " . date('Y');
Simple, but effective. Now, that’s one way to keep your old, unmaintained websites up-to-date!