:: TheOneAndTheOnly.com - Andrew Buckman ::

Since hink asked, here are my thoughts on the whole Google Sitemaps idea.

Overall, I love it. The ability to tell the search engines “hey, check this page out often and don’t bother with these over here but once a month” could prove quite useful. That said, part of me wonders if it isn’t just adding extra work for web developers that already have too much to do, though for a proper dynamic site a little work upfront to let the site generate the sitemap itself should mostly negate that. Even so, Google seems to do a pretty good job on their own without our input.

Then of course we all know that (the majority of?) sites will use the sitemaps completely improperly. Does anyone want to bet how many “webmasters” will setup a Google Sitemap telling them to check every single page, every day, with all pages at a priority of 1.0 because everything on my site is important! The concept of ‘relative to other pages on the same site’ will escape them and while they’re only hurting themselves with that, I feel for anyone having to explain to a client why a particular page on their site was only assigned a 0.3 priority let alone 0.1.

In the end I expect it will stick around, Google will ignore a good portion of them due to improper setup, and those with well designed sitemaps will benefit. Which I like to think is a good thing.

Google recently released their new Google Sitemaps as a beta (what do you expect from google?), here a few links I’ve been reading on the subject.

Google Sitemaps Homepage

Google Sitemap Protocol

Google Sitemaps Overview from Search Engine Watch

Breaking Down Google Sitemaps XML from Social Patterns

Google Sitemap for Wordpress Blogs also from Social Patterns

Introducing “official support” for IE6. Hopefully I didn’t break anything in the process!

After much frustration, I’m pleased to announce that Editor Search now works in Internet Explorer 6.0. IE appears to automatically scroll the textarea to the proper position when I move the cursor, so that should be perfectly accurate, however the slight deviation from the proper position still occurs in Firefox, hoping to minimize/eliminate that in 1.3 or 1.4. One minor difference in IE is that word searching doesn’t currently wrap when you reach the end, I should be fixing that in 1.3.

Download Editor Search 1.2 Plugin for WordPress 1.5

Editor Search Permalink

Released a new copy of my WordPress plug-in, Editor Search, today. No major changes and all the caveats from 1.0 still apply.

The only noticable change is the addition of form tags around the input boxes to facilitate hitting the enter/return key after typing in your search phrase or line number. In the background, the code added to the editor pages should now be Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Download Editor Search 1.1 Plugin for WordPress 1.5

Editor Search Permalink

Another quick How-To for Plesk 7.5 Reloaded for Linux. I was setting up a Web User account and realized there is no option to grant SSH access in the control panel when doing so. Obviously that’s normally a good thing, but with scp-only as the shell to allow SFTP/SCP without granting actual SSH access, I wanted to assign it to the web users. Fortunately it’s quick and painless to do so on the command line via SSH.

First, create the web user and note the name of the account. We’ll use paris for our example.

Now, login via SSH, su to become root, and enter the line below:
usermod -s/usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server paris

That should change the shell for the user to scp-only. If you haven’t already installed scp-only, check out my other post on the subject: HOW-TO: SFTP on Plesk 7.5 Reloaded for Linux.