Dave’s Rants

If you follow Google or are into web development/design you may have heard about the launch of Google Sitemaps. Basically what a Sitemap traditionally has been is a HTML page of all the contents of your site, now Google have launched specifications for a XML version of your sitemap. What this means is that you can submit this page to Google and they’ll then index all the pages in the sitemap. This is better than the traditional way Google learned which pages to index which was to simply start at the site root, i.e. in this case http://davesrants.com/ and work its way through the links from that point. With the new system it should be able to index unlinked pages, which is pretty cool!

Anyway now you have to deal with how to generate the xml file. Having just moved to Wordpress I soon found how quickly the community works at generating new plugins/scripts. Initially I played around with Michael Nguyen’s code before I moved on to a varation on this code. I finally ended up with this code - http://davesrants.com/sitemap.txt Just as I submitted my sitemap for the second time I discovered this extremely polished plugin for Wordpress. Arne Brachhold’s plugin seems to have all the settings covered and looks fantastic. If you’re using Wordpress check it out!

Of course now we just have to wait to see if Google bothers to use the data from the Sitemaps!

Update (6/6/2005 13:30): Just spotted a Movable Type implementation if that’s what floats your boat.