It’s a new year and that mean it’s time to update your blog copyright notice to say 2010. If you haven’t done this yet, you need to do it now. If your blog doesn’t have a copyright notice, you should add one right away. Many bloggers may consider this a relatively minor issue but from a professionalism and branding standpoint, making sure your blog has a copyright notice with the correct year is very important.
For most bloggers, this is a simple task of logging into your WordPress admin panel and editing the footer.php file in the themes editor. Find the part that says copyright 2009 and change it to say copyright 2010. Because this is done only once a year, many bloggers will forget to update the copyright notice.
How To Update The Copyright Notice Automatically
Log into your WordPress themes editor and open the file that holds your copyright notice. For most WordPress themes, this will be the footer.php file. Keep in mind that you can only edit a file from the WordPress themes editor if the file permission is set to writable. If the file is not writable, you will have to FTP in to change the permission or update the file with FTP.
Find the part with the copyright notice and replace it with the following.
Copyright © <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> Blog Name
Instead of hard coding 2010 into the copyright notice, you replace it with <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?>, which will automatically pull in the year from your web server calendar. This only works if your server is set to the correct year. If it’s not, you’ll have to get your admin or web host provider to adjust the date. In my case, I like to do my copyright from the year the blog started. The code will look like this.
Copyright © 2005 – <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> John Chow, Inc.
Now, instead of trying to remember to update the copyright notice at the start of every year, the blog will do it automatically. That is, as long as the clock on the server is correct. 🙂