How to Auto-update Your Copyright in WordPress

(Republished from last year, because you need it.)

So it’s a new year…have you forgotten anything?

Here’s a hint:

Ever see a site with a copyright statement 6 months out of date? Even big-shot corporate blogs make this mistake. But on a young, growing blog, it looks particularly bad.

Or perhaps you don’t have a copyright statement at all? Tsk tsk.

Why don’t we automate this, so we’ll never, ever have to think about it again? Here’s how to do it in WordPress:

1. Log in to WordPress, and go to Theme Editor.
2. Choose “footer.php”.
3. Delete your current copyright statement (if it exists), and insert the following code:&copy; 2008 – <?php echo date(Y); ?>…replacing “2008″ with the date you started your blog.
4. If you wish, put your name adjacent to the copyright, being sure not to disturb the php date tag. See mine below for an example.
5. Done.

Happy New Year! Anyone got a good detox recipe?

What Is PageRank Anyway?

Last week I put up a self-congratulatory post about my new Google PageRank. However, anyone new to SEO might not even know what I was talking about. And unfortunately, experienced SEO “experts” often know even less than beginners. So here’s a quick summary.

PageRank is one of the factors Google uses to determine how “important” a page is. This is key, since it needs a way to determine which results come up higher than others. For anyone in business on the web, this can translate directly into dollars, euros or shekels. For anyone else, it helps determine how much attention you get. Either way, it’s a big deal.

In essence, it’s a system of voting. When page A on the internet links to page B, it’s considered to have “voted” for it. So the page that gets the most votes wins, right? Well, not necessarily – for not all votes are created equal. A “vote” from a huge, important site is given much more weight than a vote from your grandmother’s blog. 

And what determines a huge, important site? It has more votes (links) to it, and/or those links themselves have more importance. But how are those links determined to be “important”? Start this paragraph over, and repeat endlessly.

Yes, it’s a very big, very complicated loop. Your PageRank is determined by the PageRank of the sites that link to yours, and theirs is determined by the PageRank of sites that link to them, and on and on, billions of times over.

But it gets even more complicated. Each of us only has a limited amount of PageRank to confer to others by way of links. If I link to you, my reservoir of outgoing PageRank is diminished by a small amount. If I link to 100 pages, each link is worth less than if I link to ten.

Now take it a step further down the rabbit hole. If the act of linking to you diminishes the power of the link I give you, how much is my link worth – its value before it existed, or after? And how can Google determine anyone’s PageRank until they’ve calculated everyone else’s PageRank? And how can they calculate those, until they’ve calculated all the others?

The answer is actually pretty mundane: Google just throws in a little “damping factor” and runs the calculations over and over until the difference in numbers gets so small as to be insignificant. Voila.

If you can stand some math, this is a fine explanation of the calculations involved, and this is a still-complex but slightly less math-oriented approach, which links to a very nice calculator you can use to estimate the effects of internal and external links on your own site.

Google Wonder Wheel

Google has rolled out an interesting experiment in search results, dubbed the Google Wonder Wheel. In this new search results view, the user can see a graphical representation of related search queries surrounding the original request, like so:

Clicking on the a suggested related topic then returns the new results, and presents related queries for the new search. As you keep exploring related topics, the old searches remain onscreen, represented as the “tail” of your current search:

The related searches could use some work – so far I haven’t found them to be incredibly useful, and overall the Google Wonder Wheel is a bit of a toy. But what a toy it is – I’ve spent quite a bit of time enjoying it so far. Hopefully as the experiment continues, the results will get better.

Another less flashy, but more useful feature that comes along with the Google Wonder Wheel is the new Timeline view. A search on “baseball” seen in Timeline view allows you to zero in on results related to a certain year, and even month. For example, by clicking through to May of 1862, I can see that the Star Spangled Banner was first played at a baseball game on May 15th of that year:

The results aren’t perfect- some irrelevant content slips through based on passing uses of the search term – but for researchers and students, this will be pure gold.

Several other alternate views are included in the Google Wonder Wheel experiment as well, including longer textual excerpts, and a different type of image search which presents images from relevant pages inline with search results.

The Google Wonder Wheel has been dubbed an prototype, and is only available to some users. However, if you’d like to give it a spin, all you need to do is set a cookie in your browser to tell Google you’re participating. Here’s the trick:

Go to google.com. With Google loaded in your browser, paste the following code in your address bar and hit return:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Nothing happens…at first. But now perform another search in Google, and on the results page you’ll notice a small “Show Options…” link just below the Google logo. Click this, and you’re off and running.

Now the question is: will this change the way you search, or is it just a toy?