Good news for owners of WordPress Blogs! WordPress 2.o is in the final stages of testing. You can download the lates release candidate here. From all accounts it should be worth the upgrade. If you are already using the current release canditate, leave a comment here and let me know what you think.
Julian has a review of plug-ins for wordpress that will take care of your sitemap creation in a much more automated way. If you run a wordpress blog you really ought to take a look. Thanks, Julian!
I was surfing blogs this morning, as usual, and I came across this one called “The Cruel Offender“. What an ass he (I use the male pronoun because I hate to think any woman would be such an ass) has made of himself. It’s kind of ironic actually because his whole mission seems to be to point out the faults and shortcomings of everyone but himself.
He presumes, first of all, that he is an authority on blogging and that his “critiques” will somehow make the blogging world a better place. It is laughable, really. Tell me, you bloggers out there, why do you blog? I know that every one of us has a hope that someone will read our blog and find it interesting enough to come back and read it again, but is that the reason you blog? It isn’t for me.
The truth is I blog for myself most of all. I hope that my posts are interesting and I try to make them so, but I’m not making any money here. It’s not about you, reader. No offense intended, and I’m sure most of you can identify with this feeling.
“The Cruel Offender” would have us all blogging in a sterile, impersonal way. His way.
I quote him here from his own article, “Aren’t We a Wee Bit Arogant?”:
“And let’s not be so arrogant as to believe that we can each do it best.”
Look in the mirror.
This post is primarily for webmasters, so I apologize to my non web-savvy readers.
As site owners we are concerned with having our sites quickly and completely indexed by search engines. There is plenty of argument on the subject of which search engine is best, but Google is certainly the biggest. Google, like other engines, sends out its spiders on a regular basis and looks for new sites and new pages within sites.
Google will find your site by one of the following methods:
Allowing Google to find your site through it’s normal crawl process can take a very long time, possibly months. If you don’t really care about your listing in Google this is certainly the easiest way to go, but if it matters to you at all the other two options are better.
Submitting your url to Google will speed things up a bit, but you still are not assured that Google will find every page on your site. If you are a blogger, and you probably are if you are reading this on my site, each of your posts represents a new and different page that is searchable by google users. Having all of those pages properly indexed by the search engines will direct more people to your site.
The best way to get your site listed completely and quickly (quickly is relative to the months you might have to wait otherwise) is to submit a sitemap to Google. A sitemap is a file that is generated by you, or by some software that you initiate as the webmaster. Google likes it sitemaps in XML format. Explaining XML is beyond the scope of this post, but if you are interested, you can start here.
Generating an XML sitemap by hand is possible, but would be tedious and painful. Thankfully there are numerous programs out there that will do the job for you with the click of a button. You can search Google for “site map generator” and find about 14,300,000 references. There are a lot of good tools out there. You can pay for them if you like pretty buttons and graphics, but this is a huge waste of money in my opinion since so many are free.
I have used several free sitemap generators. All of them have limitations on the number of pages they will index for you. Some are limited to a few hundred, others to a few thousand. This is probably more than enough for most bloggers, but if you have any business related sites it is not unheard of to have 5,000 pages or more. I have had sites with 11,000 pages.
I found a free web based sitemap generator this morning that has a limit of 50,000 indexed pages. Only the most insane of you will find this limit frustrating. This java program runs right from your browser and will save a .xml file right to your computer where you can FTP it to your site. FTP is another topic completely and again is beyond the scope of this post. If you don’t know FTP, you probably are not ready to start worrying about sitemaps anyway.
AuditMyPC.com hosts the tool I found this morning. Just click on the graphic icon, enter your URL, and Voilà! It really is an easy tool to use, and the best I have found. If you like this or if you have found something better, leave a comment to share with other readers.
Again, the tool can be found at http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
Just a quick follow-up to my previous post on mentoring. It’s official, the young man I was talking about was accepted into his alternative school and I was selected as his mentor. Apparently he was required to have 2 mentors apply for the program, but I was chosen.
So my new adventure begins in January. I spoke to him this morning and he seems excited about it. Well … as excited as 16 year olds ever sound about anything.
I’ll keep you posted.
Luka tagged me early this morning. She probably should have been in bed, but instead she decided to victimize me. So the rules are that I have to confess. There just isn’t room on this blog to confess to everything, so I will choose a few choice items. Then I will tag some other unsuspecting bloggers and watch them squirm.
I confess … that I enjoy sitting hunched over my keyboard with a good cup of coffee as I read my daily blogs and news.
I confess … that I believe sick days from work should not be wasted on days when you feel sick. Call in well.
I confess … that my brother’s new blog is likely to be better than mine and I will feel jealous and inferior. These feelings will evolve into bitterness and I will grow old before my time because of my deeply concealed pain.
I confess … that the last confession may have been a bit exaggerated.
I confess … that my wife Mel is the only person who really knows where my keys are half the time.
Now … the following people have been tagged; Chris, Tarragon, Ivory Frog, and Beau. Visit their sites to see if they confess, and be thankful I didn’t pick you.