In “10 complaints the customers have about the design of corporate web sites”, Luke Manion mentions having current date information on your website. His tenth pet peeve is “Out of Date Information.”

An outdated copyright date or an expired offering calls all the information on a website into question as to its correctness.

I agree with Manion—I find it to be a big turn-off when a website doesn’t have a current date listed. It tells me that the site owner or maintainer doesn’t care about keeping the site up, or doesn’t know how to set it automatically.

While this concept may be a no-brainer for many webmasters and website owners, other owners and maintainers seem to ignore the easy fix—let the copyright date update itself.

At the very least, the outdated copyright date screams, “We don’t update our site. You can’t trust any of the content here.”

Of course, there are some exceptions like the homespun websites that are just flat HTML files with no scripting support. But come on—if you use any of the popular hosting services out there, whether it is a Windows, Linux, or Apple server environment, you probably have access to at least one of the common scripting languages such as PHP, ASP, or Coldfusion.

If you have an out-of-date copyright in your website footer, go fix it today. It will add credibility to your website and give the impression that you care about what your visitors see and read. Your visitors will be impressed at the turn of the year when your site date automatically changes. As a plus on the technical side, you will have one less thing to worry about when January 1st rolls around.

Here are some code samples for adding a dynamic date to your website page or blog template¹. The output desired is:

Copyright 2008 My Company.

PHP

Copyright <?= date('Y') ?> My Company.

VBScript (ASP)

Copyright <%= now(yyyy) %> My Company.

CFML (Coldfusion)

Copyright <cfoutput>#DateFormat(now(), "yyyy")#</cfoutput> My Company.

JSP (Java)

Copyright <%= new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy").format(new java.util.Date()) %> My Company.

RHTML (Ruby)

Copyright <%= "#{Date.today.year}" %> My Company.

Note: I do not guarantee that these code samples will work with your server and website setup. These snippets are here to show you how easy it can be to output a dynamic date in the most common scripting languages. Please use with caution and test thoroughly before using on a production website. ↩

37signals, makers of Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise and other great software have published their ideas for making their company a great place to work: Workplace Experiments. Included in their experiments are shorter work weeks, funding people’s passions, and discretionary spending accounts.

As I read their introductory post I reminded myself that in my one-man business I’ve already put several of these ideas into practice.

Shorter work week
I started a 4-day work week April 25th, 2007. Having Fridays free from client work has been a huge blessing. I can play, work on personal projects, or just catch up on reading and learning. In the middle of our traveling and RVing it was often a perfect day to leave our RV park and hit the road. We would beat the weekend traffic, get to our location sooner, and be able to visit and sightsee before starting the next week of work. And as 37signals points out, “We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.” So true.

Funding my passions
This is self-fulfilling since I am a freelancer. But, I still have to be disciplined enough to put it into practice. My current passion is travel and learning; this includes working with my wife to publish our photos and stories (she does most of that work). Our work discipline has paid off big in this regard. Having a mobile and flexible work situation funds our passions directly. We can travel where we wish—visiting family and friends and seeing every corner of our beautiful country.

Spending accounts
This one is also easy to do when you are your own boss and accountant. I generally buy any book that is needed for learning web design or development—especially if I can find a used copy on Amazon. I decided with my wife, who I include on business and financial decisions, that anything under a certain amount (say $100) would not require a discussion—I could just buy it and not have to worry about it. Big ticket items still require careful thinking and planning, which is the way it should be whether you are a one-man team or a 100-person in-house group.

I’m glad to see 37signals set the bar high for the industry in publishing their workplace experiments. They continue to be an enormous inspiration to businesses big and small. I’m also happy that I’ve been setting these same principles into practice for at least a year—with great results.

If you like Twitter and the idea that you can easily follow along with what your friends and colleagues are doing all day, you might like the new Prologue Wordpress Theme.

The theme skins your blog to look like a set of Twitter updates, and the “what are you doing now?” form for posting an update is conveniently located on the top of the home page.

This setup would be perfect for small groups or distributed teams who want to keep track of each other. You could password-protect the blog if you want to limit who can view the posts. In the same way, you limit those that could post updates by having only registered users be able to post updates.

The Prologue team has already released an update that improves the layout of the updates and includes Gravatar support.

Give it a try on your own by downloading the theme, or open a free Wordpress.com account and give it a spin there.

The United States Postal Service finally caught up to UPS, FedEx, and DHL with automatic tracking. Previously I had to manually enter the same tracking code over and over again on their website until the letter or package was delivered and the USPS updated its status in their system.

Now, after you enter the tracking number the first time, you will see the email tracking option underneath the search results.

The email form allows you enter 1–3 email addresses for receiving updates on the package status.

I wish this had been available when I worked in a mail order department of a retail store (Summit Hut backroom staff take notice).

Package tracking for me is most convenient via RSS. I use Bloglines’s built-in Package Tracker to add tracking numbers. When an update is available, it is marked as “new” in Bloglines. Since my last use of the Package Tracker, Bloglines has now added USPS as an option.

If you track USPS packages or letters, it is now easier.

• Hausschrift-Liste Unternehmen-zu-Schrift – Typografie.info TypoWikiCheck the list to see what typeface (font) your favorite corporation uses.(Tags: design, typography, business, fonts, reference)
• Jason Santa Maria | Freedom, Terrible FreedomAmazing how often I get into good design vs. bad design scenarios with clients… guess it comes with the territory. It’s hard not to get upset when people don’t want to go with your awesome idea, though… especially when it makes sense for the end customer (that is, it’s not just what the client wants).(Tags: design, work, clients, professional, project-management)
• Massive Dreamhost hack, WordPress not to blameDreamhost admits vulnerability in an attack that affected 3,000 or more FTP accounts… looks like now it’s affecting other webhosts, though. My Dreamhost domains were not affected, thankfully.(Tags: hosting, security, dreamhost, ftp)
• Travelling Cross-Country by Train.This humorous and well-written depiction of US train travel is spot on. Erin and I took the train from Arizona to Illinois a few years back, and this list pretty much sums up our trip.(Tags: humor, tips, travel, train)

It’s over… my time in Austin, that is. I had a great time listening to live music, seeing friends and colleagues, and enjoying the city’s great eateries. Big cheers to the free buses (aka “Dillos”) that served our RV campground conveniently, though I must say the walk home was very pleasant along the Town Lake bike/hike path.

Three hip-hip-hurrays to the SXSW Interactive conference, also. It was great to meet everyone including: Dominique Lussier (Ottawa, Canada), John Mosteller, Christiano Prado, Grant Hutchins (newly of SpiceWorks in Austin, TX), Rob Grady, Dan Ritzenhaler and Ryan Johnson (Forty) and the good folks from SOMA FM (I told them that I love Big Al, their AI DJ and got a sticker!). James Archer and Nathan Smith—sorry we didn’t get to talk and catch up. I hear from lots of folks that attended this year that it was almost impossible to catch everyone for more than a “hello”, so hopefully we can connect again soon.

The conference has grown (a lot) since my first time in 2005. It’s good for the industry, and shows an enthusiasm that is contagious enough to bring the creative industry (aka Interactive) to the mainstream. The downside was some logistical issues at the conference center and a harder time meeting and talking to everyone. I’m thinking of skipping next year and going to a WDN or AEA conference instead.

Here are my thoughts, gripes, and notes:

Helvetica: Love it or Hate it

I had the pleasure of attending the world premier of the film Helvetica. It was inspiring, educational, funny, and elegant. Most impressive for a film about a typeface! Go see it if you get a chance. See the full screening schedule. (Also note Kottke’s review.)

Future Panelists?

Notes to all future panelist/speakers:

1. Please post slides to a URI for later reference (and for those that didn’t make it to the panel)
2. Please use a simple, not clever, title for your talk, and stick with the topic after giving the details to the SXSW folks. There were several sessions this year that seemed to promise A,B,C and delivered X,Y,Z; in one case it worked out well and in another case it was disappointing.

Sessions

Following are my notes and links from the sessions I attended. Like several other attendees, I tended to enjoy the one or two person sessions that were focused and well-prepared (as opposed to a fairly general panel that covered some ground but didn’t leave us with a lot of “take-aways” or solid learning.)

My favorites: After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration (slides, podcast) and Web Typography Sucks. I liked both because they were superbly delivered, had great content, included valuable lessons, and covered areas that I need to work on.

Wishlist: Two sessions that I wish I had gone to are Writing, Better and Javascript: The Big Divide—both had great feedback and started good discussions. Can’t wait for the rest of the podcasts…

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