[ic] OT Google optimisations

[Daniel Collis-Puro]

Steve Graham wrote:

<snip>

> Just started looking at sitemaps.....
> Am considering http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
> They have a very inexpensive php program that can be scheduled to run
> from a cron job - am looking closely at this - haven't decided.
> Sitemaps, Froogle etc are all free to implement via the Google base
> interface. Use the term Free at your own risk...lol... Not sure how
> much TIME it will take.
>
> I created a couple of sitemaps from the above web site for a couple
> simple sites that I maintain, and it worked well - testing to see how
> long it takes for Google to add these pages to the index.

Steve,

If you want to keep your automated sitemap creation in perl, I've found
WWW::Google::SiteMap::Robot to be a relatively good (and free) option.

http://search.cpan.org/~jasonk/WWW-Google-SiteMap-1.09/lib/WWW/Google/SiteMap/Robot.pm

It spiders your site like a web browser and allows you to restrict pages
/ page types added to your sitemap, among other features.

Two issues I've run into -

1) It appends to your sitemap file instead of re-creating it on each
run. This is easily solved, but an odd default.
2) It can get caught in an infinite loop if you have a bug in how you
create URLs on your site.

Otherwise, it works quite nicely.

--DJCP


-- 
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Daniel Collis-Puro
Software Engineer
End Point Corp.
dan at endpoint.com
(office) 781-477-0885
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