A short time ago, I realized that I had a problem. The service I use to copyright what is posted on this site and my other two sites, namely MyFreeCopyright…lost everything. All the copyright files, all gone. I was really an unhappy camper you might say.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to undo the damage, and I know it has happened to others out there in blogging land. Part of the problem with doing this copyright thing initially is that only ten of the recent posts are going to show up as copyrighted, which means that you and I  get to manually add the rest of the posts.

Actually, I figured out how to copyright all the posts at once. Maybe a lot of you know how to do this already, and I am the one who does not know what is going on!

Anyway, MyFreeCopyright picks up the blog posts because it monitors the RSS or Atom feed from the blog. Most blogs are set to show the ten most recent blogs in the feed. Here is how to fix this, open up the dashboard in your blog (this is for WordPress blogs) and click Settings, then click Reading, on the page that opens you will see a few lines down “Syndication feeds show the most recent“, in the box next to this you need to change the number to a number higher than your total post count on your blog. Then go to MyFreeCopyright and sign up again to protect your blog(s). When you have completed this step…be sure you go back and change the number of syndicated posts in the feed back to ten!

If you have placed the copyright symbol on all of your posts as I did, those symbols will now point to nothing! I went back and changed all of mine to the new copyright, unfortunately you must do these one at a time. The copyright symbol points to a list of your copyrights on MyFreeCopyright’s website, so if you do not change it it will point to nothing as mentioned before. Do you have to change all of the copyright symbols? That is up to you, you do not have to.

If you change your Symbol(s), and you should at least change the copyright symbol you have as a widget on your front page, this will require some modification. MyFreeCopyright changed the HTML code they use to make the symbol. It will still appear on your blog, but some of the code is automatically deleted by WordPress (there is now Java script in the code, and WordPress does not allow Java to be used on the blogs, unless you have a WordPress.org account) when you save it, and you are left with some left-over print that appears on top of the code…it does not look very good. It also displays a video link on the bottom which I can personally do without. Here is how to fix this…I would not mess with the code unless you know what you are doing! The easy way is to re-use the old code. Simply copy the numbers only in the MCN code that is part of the HTML, and drop it into your old HTML code in the same place! Walla…new symbol with no issues.

Here is just the first few lines of what the code looks like,

<script>(function () { document.write(“<sc”+”ript type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.myfreecopyright.com/badge.js?mcn=registered_mcn/BY6KL-VEP3C-1LK6G‘></”+”script>”);} () )</script><div><a href=”http://www.myfreecopyright.com/registered_mcn/registered_mcn/BY6KL-VEP3C-1LK6G” title=”MyFreeCopyright.com Registered & Protected” ><img src=”http://storage.myfreecopyright.com/mfc_protected.png”

Only copy the letters and numbers that are right after mcn/ Then simply paste them into your old code to update it. I keep my HTML copyright codes in a file on my laptop for easy access.

If you are first placing MyFreeCopyright on your blog, or do not have the copyright anymore but would like to and do not have the old code, email me at the address on this blog and I will send it to you.

I hope this helps someone out there.

Greg