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Automatically update the copyright year in your footer

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If you work on many websites it doesn’t take long before you realize how many of them have out of date copyright dates in the footer. Back in the good old days when sites were hand-coded and php was seldom used, copyright dates were hard-coded along with just about everything else.

It’s so easy to fix that problem and I”m going to show you how simple it is. You don’t need to know anything about php either. All you have to do is drop this little piece of php code into your footer and it will take care of the annual updating of the year for you. No more batch search and replace operations to replace 82 pages of out of date copyright years. Yay!

So let’s say your current footer looks something like this…

<p id="footer">copyright © 1998 by My Big Old Company, Inc</p>

To put that copyright year on auto-pilot, simply drop this bit of code in there and sit back and relax.

<p id="footer">copyright © <?php echo date('Y'); ?> by My Big Old Company Inc</p>

If your copyright is a range of years, like 2001-2011, just add the snippet after the dash of the first year like this…

<p id="footer">copyright © 2001-<?php echo date('Y'); ?> by My Big Old Company, Inc</p>

I don’t know much about PHP but I do know how to add that little bit of code and it takes away a big nuisance that used to occur every year. You can learn more about PHP and the date function by visiting PHP.net

Quix app packs a lot of tools into a small footprint

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Quix logoQuix, authored by Joost de Valk, is a huge productivity enhancer for webdevelopers, and anyone wishing to have easy access to a plethora of handy tools.

Quix is am extensible bookmarklet that you simply drag into your bookmarks toolbar in Safari, Firefox and several other browsers. Then by invoking Quix, a command line opens up in a small window into which you can enter easy to remember default commands to perform a variety of functions. Since it is extensible, you can create your own custom commands as well.

Quix command-line window

For instance, say you want to quickly check what your ip address is… you would invoke Quix, type in “myip” in the command line and hit enter and you’ve instantly got your ip displayed in your browser window. Another example is if you want to measure the size of an element on a webpage, you’d invoke Quix, type in “ruler” and a cross-hair appears on your screen with a dimensions palette next to it and you can easily measure a graphic or any area on the current webpage you are on.

I haven’t counted all the functions available in Quix but there are surely over 60 of them and most are easy to remember… “ruler” for the aforementioned ruler tool, “gs” for Google search, “a” for Amazon search, “bitly” for bit.ly URL shortening, you get the idea. The complete list is located on the Quixapp website

It’s a real time-saver and obviates the need to have lots of add-ons since so many functions are taken care of by Quix. Joost admits that the inspiration for Quix came from another similar app called Shortwave which was created by Shaun Inman.

Check Quix out. It may be one of the handiest tools you have at your disposal. You can get it from quixapp.com

Update: I’ve also created a quick tutorial on the installation and usage of Quix.