Google Sitemaps


For as long as this blog has had an Atom feed, I've also published my entire site as an Atom feed whose entries include the pages outside the blog too. I'm not talking about a "recent changes" feed (although that would be useful), I'm talking about a snapshot of the entire site.

It was initially just an experiment in uses of Atom beyond blogs but it had the interesting side-effect that, if I subscribed to the feed in Bloglines, Bloglines would tell me whenever someone referenced a non-blog page on my site.

I don't publish the URI of my "site map" because, until Leonardo has caching (which is the big theme of 0.7) it's too inefficient to generate frequently.

Now, thanks to Google, I have an extra incentive to do so. Google has just announced Google Sitemaps which is a format for informing search crawlers about resources that exist on your site.

Like Bob Wyman, I wondered why they couldn't have just used Atom as the format for this. Well, buried down in a FAQ, Google say they will accept Atom 0.3 feeds. So the feed I produce for jtauber.com will work right now.

I still would have preferred them to adopt Atom as the primary format and just use extensions for any extra information they needed.

The original post was in the categories: leonardo this_site google atom_format but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.