Great tool to share today.
Ran across this website XML-Sitemaps.com that does exactly what you would want it to do.
You enter the website you want it to crawl and generate the XML sitemap for and a few minutes later it provides links to XML (compressed and uncompressed), text and HTML sitemaps for easy use.
It also allows you to specify the frequency, priority and created dates.
There is a 500 page cap on the service, but they also offer a PHP script version for about $20 bucks that you can install on your own server to generate sitemaps for unlimited pages.
Check them out and save yourself some time.
XML-sitemaps.com : Free Online Google Sitemap generator
For anyone who read my previous post on getting one my sites ripped off, this is not a follow-up, but if you read that post you’ll understand that I don’t expect to have any resolution to that individual issue for the very reasons that made it so frustrating.
However, another site has done the same thing and even worse. And these guys are open-season.
But what’s really interesting is how we found these site-ripping bastards:
We work closely with a specialized 3rd party ecommerce service provider that provides a hosted service, where mulitple clients have “stores” all on their servers. So this service provider was contacted by a client with an odd situation. Apparently they billed and sent a gift card to a customer who had not ordered from their site but from another site in another state.
How on earth could that have happened? (ahh, come on you know how)
The other business ripped off the site we built for our customer and did not change one of the links that led to our customers hosted store. So when their customer followed the “bad” link they hadn’t changed, it sent their customer to our customer’s site and since they looked identical, their customer had no idea they were buying from another company entirely.
Quite amusing, actually, especially for my co-workers who were really hoping that I would call the offending company (they really enjoy it when I rip into people for some reason).
But alas, while it was our work that was ripped off, it is work that we were paid for so it is our client’s property and their fight. They have been informed. They are not happy. And they are the ones with the lawyers on staff.
At least no bureaucratic nonsense should prevent this one from getting interesting.
I haven’t posted in a while, because to be honest, I have been avoiding the computer as much as possible in my down time. Work has been crazy and there’s been little time between tasks to really see what else was going on in the rest of the world that I may comment on. So, I decided to comment quickly on my current feelings of burnout and overload.
So what has a passionate web guy wanting to give it all up to drive a bread truck or go back to his days as a bookstore clerk or pizza delivery guy?
There just seems to be too much going on and just keeping up with what’s going on in web development nowadays seems to be a full-time job on its own.
I’ll probably get crucified by the web community as a whole for saying it, but sometimes I wish the Internet would just SLOW THE F**K DOWN!
The signs of an impending backlash of our society’s always-on, broadband, social media networking (r)evolution are getting stronger and stronger. Mulitasking is bullshit and we get less done when we try to get more done. Email is evil and makes workers less productive and reduces effective communication. And at the end of it all, I am spending all my time, creating things that do not physically exist and will most likely be obsolete before they are even complete.
My movie buff mind keeps falling back to a scene in “City Slickers” where during a “what does your parent do” presentation at his son’s elementary school, Billy Crystal, a radio advertising exec staring down the barrel of a mid-life crisis, comes to the realization that when you really break it down, he “sells air.” Intangible, fleeting, moments in time. Air. So what is the difference between air and a line of code, a well-placed pixel or a search engine ranking. Well, people actually breathe Air.
Is it really a good idea for us to eat sleep and breathe the other stuff?
Guess I need to learn how to drive a stick. The bread truck is calling.
I am a Southern boy. Born and bred and proud of it, though from time to time, it is really hard to defend some of the things about Southern culture that emerge on the national radar.
Like when you hear some jackass like Brad Paisley singing a song on the Grammys about how he wants to check his girlfriend for ticks.
Ticks are parasitic creatures that feed off their hosts and spread disease.
Sound like anyone you know, Brad?
Quit feeding off the dregs of Southern culture and perpetuating the virulent disease that is the current stereotypical views of the South.
There are great individuals and organizations fighting hard to have our states taken seriously and to abolish the perception of Southerners as somehow inferior to those of other regions. Please stand on the side of those trying to improve our lives.
Or at the very least, just shut up and don’t make it any harder for us.