Scott Hanselman

I just checked in support for generation of Google Sitemaps directly from DasBlog. Omar anticipates a release this week. We also have a continuous integration build going internally thanks to Paul van Brenk so we may be able to have always-fresh" releases soon (remember to back up your stuff and manually merge the httpHandlers section of your web.config). We also will have an AJAX-based "autosave draft" feature as well thanks to Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.

NOTE: The daily builds from Paul are DAILY BUILDS. They are not the official release. We'll release the final one SourceForge. However, I'm ALWAYS running the daily build on this blog, so it's pretty baked. Upgrading is just copying a few new files and merging your web.config.
UPDATE: Daily Builds of DasBlog are at http://dasblog.info/dbftp/

If you haven't yet, go log into Google Webmaster Tools and check out what Google knows about your site. It includes a robots.txt validator and lets you know what keywords folks are using to get to your site.

Google sitemaps are very simple and a pretty good idea, I think. It lets me, as a blog publisher, provide a great deal of context and "freshness" data to Google that I have stored (trapped) inside the blog.

Sure, arguably they could get a lot of that information by gleaning it from If-Modified-Since headers, but this is such a simple format, why NOT do it?

Here's an example snippet. The lastmod element can include time detail as well, but I think date is enough for blog purposes. The priority is pretty much relative. In this case, the home page is more important than a post and a comments page is less important than a post page.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/default.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/archives.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CommentView.aspx?...</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FinePrintChangesTheWayIPrint.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
....SNIP....

Aside, I had no idea I was the 3rd (or so) Scott if you search just for "Scott" on Google One day I'll crush Scott Fly Rods, but until that day, it's the Bronze for me. ;)

I also encourage folks to "sesha iWeb" with Google ngaisiZulu. ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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