ArticlesBackground
At the beginning of June, I wrote about how the race had started to produce a WordPress plugin to support Google Sitemaps.
Two days later, I declared a race winner. Of the 161 search results, Michael Nguyen at Social Patterns was the first to meet the basic judging criteria.
At the time, I said I would cover the race again in a week’s time.
Over three months have passed without follow-up, and now there are over 27,000 search hits.
Let’s look at the players now.
Social Patterns
Nguyen has backed out of the race explaining that:
I won’t be writing a plugin for this since Arne Brachhold has already written a great one. Thanks Arne.
Arne Brachhold
Arne Brachhold certainly is a strong contender with his plugin, Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress V2 – one which was first available just a day after Nguyen’s. So close!
Brachhold’s solution meets all of the judging criteria:
- It supports home pages, single posts, etc.
- Bonus! It even supports a manual list of pages external to your WordPress blog.
- You can set the priority for each type of page.
- Bonus! It even offers to make the posts with more comments get treated with higher priority.
- It’s a legal WordPress plug-in.
- Bonus! It updates the site-map whenever you when you update a post, so it takes less CPU than the other on-the-fly solutions..
- It pings Google for you, which means you get registered automatically, without even requiring a Google account.
Full marks – and full bonus marks – to Arne Brachhold!
Other Contenders
Both Rodney Schupe and Sci7 offer PHP scripts (Schupe’s file and Sci7’s file) that will generate a Google Sitemap from the WordPress database. They are each very similar to the original winner from SocialPatterns, and suffer from similar problems.
Aside: Offensive Behaviour and Sci7
I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone of being a spammer on my blog. One does not do that in polite company, does one? It is not seemly. Perhaps we need a euphemism that is more socially acceptable than “spammer”?
The other day, when discussing a legal puzzle about libel with friends, I used the example of accusing someone of “interfering with elephants”. I used that example for several reasons: because it was clearly an outrageous claim that couldn’t be believed, it was also clearly obscene, and yet – somehow – it didn’t have any rude words in it that would immediately offend the parents of eavesdropping 4-year-olds.
How odd, that I somehow find it more comfortable to accuse someone of improper behaviour with a large animal than of sending unsolicited email to large numbers of people?
Sci7 Ltd are a bunch of elephant-interferers. They tend to interfere with elephants in the direction of employees of certain high-tech industries. They offer to “enable you to contact” hundreds of thousands of people in various industries. While their expertise is in “data-mining”, the purpose of that data-mining becomes clear when you here they are looking for programmers who can work on projects like “writing custom web-scraping scripts in perl”.
I prefer not to have elephants interfered with – and, indeed, I have produced a WordPress plugin to help protect email-addresses – and elephants, for that matter – from web-scraping perl scripts. I strongly considered not linking to the Sci7 site, but that seemed a bit childish.
New Winner
Looking through the first few pages of the Google search, there didn’t appear to be any more contenders, so I am happy to declare Brachhold’s plugin to the be the new winner – perhaps not quite the first, but clearly the best. Oddthinking now has Arne’s plugin installed and producing its own sitemap. Thanks Arne!
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on September 14, 2005
But thanks to the Google initiative, you could still add
rel="nofollow"to your link and be secretly childish! Isn’t technology great? 🙂Comment by Julian on September 14, 2005
Good thinking, Aristotle. Done.
Comment by Julian on October 18, 2005
It looks like Tim Buckley, of the CTRL+ALT+DEL blog and online comic, had a similar issue. His variant of my ad hominem attack is to suggest his opponent sodomizes giraffes.
Comment by Alastair on November 15, 2006
Just FYI, it seems that Google have changed the sitemaps format slightly. I don’t know how or when they did this but on logging into my google webmaster page, I found that my previously-valid sitemap now contained many errors.
I don’t know how or when they did this, and the protocol page seems to be broken right now so I can’t find out more.
In any case you might want to check and if required update your wordpress plugin.
Comment by Julian on February 5, 2007
Alister Cameron talks about how Google Sitemaps are not really required. It’s certainly worth a read for bloggers.
I am thrilled that he links to this page to let people know about the available Google Sitemap WordPress plugins. I am not quite so thrilled that, perhaps unintentionally, he makes it sound like I am an example of (a) someone who considers such a plugin a must-have, and (b) someone who doesn’t really know why.
I don’t consider such a plugin a must-have. In fact, in my first post on the subject. over 18 months ago, I wondered whether Google Sitemaps would be worth the effort:
I think this is a remarkably similar position to Alister’s.
However, in my second post on the subject, I identified an advantage of sitemaps.
So, while I don’t think they are a must-have plugin, I do know why I want one!