January 6, 2009 in Every year, around this time, I love going to popular websites and seeing if they have changed their footer copyright dates yet. I guess you could call it one of my hobbies. This year, I was especially surprised with some of the websites I saw, so I thought I would share them with you.
Before I actually get to the list, I want to give you a quick tip on how to keep your blog updated forever without having to manually change the footer date. You can use this tip on any website that supports php 4 and 5. Let’s say that your blog’s footer looked something like this:
Copyright © 2009 TutorialWow.com - All Rights Reserved
To make it never have to be updated, just change it to this:
Copyright © <?php echo date("Y"); ?> TutorialWow.com - All Rights Reserved
As you can see, all I did was replace “2009″ with “< ?php echo date(”Y”); ?>”. This simply outputs the current year number, and makes for a care-free footer!
Without further nonsense, here are 34 websites that are still in 2008 (or even 2007 for some) – in no particular order.
BuySellAds
You the Designer
WebUrbanist
Speckyboy
Six Revisions
GoMediaZine
Design Bump
Designflavr
David Airey
CreativeSync
Color Overload
CrazyLeaf
FBrushes
Think Design
Digital Artist Toolbox
Hongkiat
CSS Count
Knowtebook
BrushKing
DesignNerd
Vectips
BittBox
Veerle’s Blog
Colorburned
Noupe
ImJustCreative
Just Creative Design
My Ink Blog
Fuel Your Creativity
9rules
Function
Web Designer Wall
Enough of my rantings – go update your blog footer!
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ha! thanks for the post… reminded me to update
@todd: No problem – I find it rather fun to find these sites.
Oops! Thanks for the catch!
Haha, thanks for the heads up!
Wow, you guys reply quickly.
Glad I could help!
Wow, you got me! Will change now!
Shiet, you caught us
I know it’s important to update the copyright date for new material, but shouldn’t older material have the copyright date of the year it was published? That Google page probably went up in 2008, and there haven’t been any substantive changes, so I don’t see why it should have a 2009 date on it.
In fact, changing the date on old stuff could have legal implications. Consider a post you wrote in 2007. Somebody copies it and puts it up as their own work in 2008. When you go to ask them to take it down, it won’t look too good if your copyright date post-dates theirs!
I know there are other ways of proving publication dates. But if you’re going to rely on those, there’s no point putting a copyright date on it, is there?
Which reminds me… I don’t think I have a copyright notice on my blog at all!
Haha, my bad. Thanks for the kick in the rear, I’ll have to edit the footer later!
I think this is a fun, silly post. Considering that, I think it may be too early to ‘call people out’. We’re only a week in. Now, if it were May or something… that would be good
.
Fun post though.
@Cameron: I’ve actually never really understood copyrights on blogs that much. It seems a bit strange that you can copyright something simply by putting “copyright” in your footer. I think it might be one of those things that everyone does but aren’t exactly sure why. Well, that goes for me anyway.
@Jacob, Hongkiat, Jeff Finley: Nice – no offense to anyone. Just another one of my hobbies.
@Matthew: Yes, perhaps it was a bit too early, but I guess I didn’t want someone to get to writing the article before I did. It was rather fun to see 2007 dates in there, though.
Thanks for calling me out. It’s been fixed!
http://twitter.com/colorburned
Thanks for catch, I’m surprised I didn’t have the date dynamic already. At least I’m in good company here
Myspace is still stuck in 2008!
@Andrew: I had to make sure that mine was too – I’m glad it was!
@Caroline: Wow – that’s unexpected! Thanks for pointing it out.
Oh! Thanks for reminding, I forgot to change the footer to a dynamic script..
Well, you didn’t even call me out, but it still reminded me to go update mine. I will also be updating with a variation of the code snippet you posted to automatically update the year. Rather than leaving it as a single year, I’ll be using a static number (the year I started my site) followed by the code which will automatically update the year as time passes.
Thanks again for reminding us all!
Thanks for the headsup re the year code line. In the past I’ve set just a reminder on my task list app to change the dates each year
AHAHAHA you caught me there! This must be very satisfying for you
lol
Such a creative post
) really liked it 