It’s that time of year when I am simultaneously surprised/not surprised when I see last year in the copyright slug in website footers.
And I wonder where the failure point is. When I do wireframes and functional requirements, tbh, it never occurs to me that I need to explicitly instruct a developer to make the year digits always reflect the current year. It has also never occurred to me as a developer to plonk the year in as a string.
So what it is? Page builders, whole site editing CMSs — I mean, are we seeing what happens when you give a non-programmer total control and little training? It’s a good guess.
But I’ve also worked on plenty of projects where the copyright date is right there, in footer.php or whatever, hard coded after the ©. No one’s ever complained when I made it dynamic.
The irony open-face egg sandwich
On January 7, I got an email from an old client asking if I could update the copyright date on their website. It turns out the caching plugin was to blame, and since no one had updated the website yet this year, the cache had never purged. So, third option, I guess.