It's that time of year again when the new year means our sites need new copyright dates. If you still manually change the dates, this is your reminder to do so once the new year rolls around. If you'd rather not have to remember each year, you should probably switch over to some sort of dynamic method. I'm going to make an assumption here that your site uses PHP, and give you some PHP code that will automatically supply the current year in your copyright date. To output the current date using PHP, simply use the following line of code in place of your current copyright year:
which will simply output the current year, such as 2007.
You can put any normal text before or after that, so let's say you wanted the copyright line to show the copyright symbol followed by a span of years starting with 2005. You would then use:
© 2005-
which will output © 2005-2007
Wait, what? Your site doesn't use PHP or any other language except HTML, you say? That's ok. If you'd like, you can tell your server to process all HTML pages as if they were PHP pages, without changing the filenames or extensions. As long as you have access to your .htaccess file, just add this line to it:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm .php
Now all your .html pages will be processed (parsed) as .php pages, and the code listed above can be added to them with no problems.
Note: Parsing .html pages as .php pages means a bit more processing time added to the page load, but generally speaking, it will likely be completely unnoticeable. Still, it's something to consider first.