Written on April 25, 2003
Article for Goulash Magazine
That old copyright problem
The year suddenly changes, as it often does on the occasion of every New Years. And suddenly you are faced with the immense challenge of changing the copyright on all of your web page. If you have around 10-20 web pages, this can be a big job. If you are a large site having hundreds or even more, this is even a bigger job. So how to you go about changing that copyright notice?
There are many fancy techniques for doing this. If you are a Unix geek you might write a script to attempt to automatically modify every web page. There are many other solutions like this that involve writing some kind of program or doing a fair amount of either learning or work. So something else must be considered.
The big web servers might be able to handle a copyright change. Somehow those monster machines don't have any problem with this task. But maybe you're not a monster server site and do not have a large team of web programmer geeks. Maybe you've got lots of web pages at AOL and you stuck on this problem of copyright notice change.
If you can handle DOS script programming, you might consider another kind of client based solution involving use of FEREGO's Webmatic software toolkit. But if you're like the person writing this article, the word client really messes up your thinking and totally confuses everything. After all, lawyers have clients, and well, maybe lawyers don't need to get involved yet. So you're stuck.
Maybe you understand the client concept and decide to use Webmatic to do an include on every web page. Congratulations on your cleverness. Then you can create one file and include it on every web page. If you make this included file a copyright statement and if you include it at the end of every web page then you are in luck. You can edit this one file and the copyright will be changed on all web pages. But think -- this solution using Webmatic involves writing scripts, and you don't know if that is OK. And maybe you haven't heard any talk about Webmatic yet, so you're not sure about it.
So after rubbing shoulders with your buddies, you're still stuck. How do I get information on every web page? Well, some deep pondering of this subject at FEREGO produced an answer. Use an image. Gee whiz. An image is information, and let's see -- if I include an image on every page -- hum, yes, then that information will get included on every page. But all this theoretical talk must be driving you nuts. Theory, theory, on the wall ... (and you know the rest). We have worked in Silicon Valley and we need proof that something is going to work -- theory alone does not work. OK. You win. Well, it turns out that we have proved this technique and it actually works. For a year or two, FEREGO used an image for its copyright notice, and we found out (mainly through customer service) that changing the image every year was successful in changing the copyright on every web page.
Gasp -- what an idea! -- "So you mean that every year I can just change an image to change all the copyright statements." "Yup, that's all you have to do." And this technique has been experimentally proved in the laboratory and also using real people.
Image is everything
So in summary, one image at the end of every web page will solve the problem. The image itself contains the common information that is to be included on every web page.
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