Rendering a Copyright Footer In Hugo

At the end of every year, people joke on how it’s time to update their site’s footer’s copyright year. I doubt it’s neccessary to specify the copyright year to claim copyright, but it’s a fun thing to do.

People tend to do this in JavaScript like this:

<small>© <time onload="let now=new Date();let year=now.getFullYear();this.datetime=year;this.innerText=year"></time></small>

While this works, it isn’t progressivey enhanced so there’s a chance it won’t always be there.

It makes more sense to do this in the template instead. This can be done in Hugo like this:

<small>© {{ with now.Year }}<time datetime="{{ . }}">{{ . }}</time>{{ end }}</small>

Which should result in something like © 2025 with the following markup:

<small>© <time datetime="2025">2025</time></small>

Doing this brought down the markup from 124 characters to just 50, about 2.5x less! Even if I get rid of the arguably extranious stuff (let and this) which makes it 106 characters, that’s still 2.12x smaller!