SameShirtEveryDay.com

It occurred to me that a good idea would be to add a Google sitemap to Noobkit, especially because it’s using frames. Here’s how I went about it:

In a regular controller I load up all my @packages but instead of a plain sitem_map.rhtml, I have a site_map.rxml file which looks like this:

xml.instruct!
xml.urlset "xmlns" => "http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" do
  xml.url do
    xml.loc         "http://test"
    xml.lastmod     w3c_date(Time.now)
    xml.changefreq  "monthly"
  end
  @packages.each do |package|
    xml.url do
      xml.loc         "http://www.noobkit.com/page/ref/#{package.full_name}"
      xml.lastmod     w3c_date(package.created_at)
      xml.changefreq  "monthly"
    end
  end
end

w3c_date goes into your_controller_helper.rb.

def w3c_date(date)
  date.utc.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00")
end

That’s all to it. Packages provide entry points to their entire API trees and should be enough information for Google to start crawling there.