Congratulations; you’re getting a two-fer via today’s post. Let’s start by talking about written copyrights and your blog.
Back in 2010, just before the start of summer, I was contacted by a company called Digiprove. They asked if I wanted to try out a new plugin and program they had called Copyright Proof, which would add code at the bottom of your articles to let people know that you owned the copywritten material on the page.
This is explained down below
You might not believe it now, but back then this site was ranked in the top 75,000 websites in the world. I was doing SEO much differently back then, and it worked wonders; take a look at the article I wrote before this one. I used to get lots of free offers to try things out, and this was one of the few I decided to go for. The plugin added this:
It worked wonders, and it became something I never had to worry about again. It helped a lot when I had to contact websites that were stealing my content, which I got notified about, especially when they were also using my images. I liked the idea that anyone who visited any of my blogs knew that they were seeing original content (except for the occasional image; I learned my lesson on that front).
All was well until late spring of this year. WordPress posted a message on all of my blogs (and probably everyone else’s blogs who were using the plugin) saying that they didn’t support the plugin and recommended that people stopped using it. That happens from time to time when it comes to plugins, but this one I really liked. I did what I rarely did; I wrote the company and asked them about the issue. I got a return email saying they were working on a fix and that all would be well. I’m the trusting sort, so I stuck with it…
Until around the beginning of September, when I noticed a message at the top of an article I finished writing, saying that the Copyright Proof plugin wasn’t working properly. It wasn’t working on any of the blogs I provide content on, yet I pretty much ignored the message since, as I mentioned above, they told me they were working on the program.
After I got the message again after publishing the article I linked to above, I tried sending another letter to the company; it didn’t go through. I tried going to the website; it’s no longer there. I searched through Google, and the “best” I could find was this message: “Please note that the current Digiprove service is scheduled to be switched off on 12th August 2023“.
That’s irksome! Seems I’d either been fed a line of nasty stuff, or they tried, whiffed, and decided to give up the ghost (yes, those are old phrases lol).
What was I going to do from this point on? I still wanted people who visited to know that my content was still mine, and that I owned the copyright. Well… the first picture above is the code I came up with, and what I’ll be adding at the bottom of every piece of content I write on any blogs from this point on (except the name of each blog; it would be stupid to use I’m Just Sharing everywhere else). Unfortunately, you’ll have to type the code somewhere before using it because I can’t type the code in so you can copy it, because it just creates the code that you’ll see at the end of this article.
The code tells readers everything they need to know: the month and year the article was written, and the website it was written on. Unfortunately, there’s a minor itch that will happen. If you go into the article to fix any kind of error and republish it, the copyright date will change to the day you made the change. You can decide to do two things: one, copy the image you have below and paste it into the content at the bottom of the page; two, leave it alone and move on with life.
I’m doing #2 because I don’t want to nitpick. In the past, when I made changes or repurposed previous articles, Copyright Proof would change the year to look like 2015-2021 Copyright and go forward. It’s not a big deal; the date you published the content will be the same at the top unless you change the publishing date of the article above the word “Publish”. And, by keeping the code as it is, there’s no giveaway that you’ve actually republished content unless you want to mention it.
So, if you’ve still got the plugin activated, go ahead and remove it. The copyright message will disappear from any of your previous content. You can decide to leave it there for your old content and just start using what I’ve shared with you for your newer content if seeing that error message at the top doesn’t bother you all that much. I’ve removed it from this blog, but I’ll have to think about the other blogs a bit longer.
That’s all about the first topic; let’s talk about the second, which hopefully goes quicker.
Google Analytics has changed how it tracks your information to give you metrics on how everything’s working. However, on this blog and my accountant’s blog, I’ve always wondered why I had major dips here and there; that didn’t make any sense, even if I went a while without creating anything new.
Yesterday I got the notification, which many of you who use WordPress also received, that mentioned another WordPress update. On this blog and the other one, I’m using a WordPress theme, whereas on the other two I’m using a much older theme that I customized and that I like. Before I updated this blog, I decided to do a quick test.
I went to Appearance, scrolled down to “Theme File Editor“, clicked on the link and it showed that I was using the Theme Fourteen Child theme, because I wanted to change the look without searching through all of the php files for the original theme. I checked into the Header PHP on the original theme because the child theme doesn’t have a header php file attached to it, and saw that the Google tracking code was there. I copied the theme into a notepad file, then ran the WordPress update (please tell me you’re backing up your database before doing those updates).
After the update I went back to the regular Fourteen theme… and the Google code was gone. That finally answered my question; every time there’s a change to a WordPress theme you might be missing, it erases code you’ve added to your header. Since that’s where the Google analytics code goes, it explains why my analytics were always off, and why I had to keep pasting it back in all the time, wondering why it had gone missing; ugh!
It seems I wasn’t the only person to figure this out. Had my mindset been in the right place, I’d have done my research and found that it happens to lots of people, and it goes back as far as 2017; ugh! If this is happening to you, do what I did; paste the code into a notepad file, save it, then the next time you have to update your WordPress theme, open it back up, paste the code back into the original theme’s header php, and you’re good to go; remember to post it above the code.
I think that’s enough for the day; let me know your thoughts and if I’ve helped you out. 🙂
I’m Just Sharing
