Google Sitemaps in Mephisto

written by Eadz on February 1st, 2007 @ 03:24 AM

Well we call them Google Sitemaps, but MSN and Yahoo are also on board and have formed sitemaps.org. So I guess we just call them XML sitemaps?

The 3 search engines currently don’t support the full sitemaps protocol, which is shame, hopefully by later this year they will.

First off : Mephisto, the Ruby on Rails blogging software that powers this site.

Creating a sitemap is no trouble at all with the Mephisto sitemap plugin. Although to get it working on this blog, I had to change the following in vendor/plugins/mephisto_google_sitemap/lib/mephisto_google_site_map.rb from:

    def lastmod(article)
      time_zone = TimeZone.new(article.site.timezone.current_period.utc_offset)
      latest_comment = article.comments_count.zero? ? nil : article.comments.calculate(:max, :updated_at)
      (latest_comment.nil? ? article.updated_at : latest_comment).strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S#{time_zone.formatted_offset}")
    end

to:

    def lastmod(article)
      latest_comment = article.comments_count.zero? ? nil : article.comments.calculate(:max, :updated_at)
      (latest_comment.nil? ? article.updated_at : latest_comment).strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00")
    end