Did you look up a good quick way to have an automatically generated sitemaps on a number of websites?
If you do as I have, then what you’re looking for is probably Google Sitemap Generator .
Though the software is yet in beta stage it looks promising and could be used to automatically generated sitemaps for your websites using the access logs of each of the websites as a basis for the links to be included in your sitemap.xml and from thence to sitemap.xml.gz
I decided to explain about my hurdles and pains throughout installing and configuring Google Sitemap Generator.
Since officially there is no explanation on how to install Google Sitemap Genreator beta1 on Debian Lenny Linux andpossibly some other Debian based distributions like Ubuntu.
So here is the exactly how I installed googlesitemapgenerator
1. Download the sitemap_linux beta for x86_64 if you’re running an amd64 server architecture as I am :
– Be sure to be running with a super user, otherwise the install won’t proceed
linux-server:~# wget http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/files/sitemap_linux-x86_64-beta1-20091231.tar.gz
2. Untar the archive
linux-server:~# tar -zxvf sitemap_linux-x86_64-beta1-20091231.tar.gz
drwxrwxrwx maoyq/eng 0 2009-12-31 01:24 sitemap-install/
-rwxrwxrwx maoyq/eng 5530 2009-12-31 01:24 sitemap-install/apache.sh
-rwxrwxrwx maoyq/eng 1218 2009-12-31 01:24 sitemap-install/autostart.sh
-rwxrwxrwx maoyq/eng 1145 2009-12-31 01:24 sitemap-install/google-sitemap-generator-ctl
...
linux-server:~# mv sitemap-install/ /usr/local/src
linux-server:~# cd /usr/local/src/sitemap-install/
3. Launch the google sitemap generator installer script
linux-server:/usr/local/src# ./install.sh
Next few you will be required to answer few trivial questions.
************************************************************
Welcome to Google Sitemap Generator (Beta)!
For more information, please visit:
http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/
************************************************************
PRIVACY WARNINGAny Sitemap information that you send to Google, including Sitemaps created
using the Sitemap Generator, should be consistent with commitments you make to
your users in your site’s privacy policy. If your site contains or generates
URLs that contain user information, you must filter the user information out of
the data that you send to Google. Instructions for filtering such information
can be found in the Sitemap Generator configuration instructions.
In addition, you must add language to your privacy policy substantially similar
to the following: “This site uses a tool that collects your requests for pages and passes elements of them to search engines to assist them in indexing this site. We control the configuration of the tool and are responsible for any information sent to the search engines.”
The product Terms of Service follows. …………………………
now press q
Do you agree with the Terms of Service? [N/y] y
This installation updates the Apache configuration file. To find that file,the installer needs the location of the Apache binary (httpd) or controlscript (apachectl). The binary or control script that you specify mustsupport the -V option.
What is the location of the Apache binary or control script? [/usr/sbin/apache2]/usr/sbin/apache2ctl
Can’t determine Group directive for Apache./usr/sbin/apache2ctl is not a supported Apache binary or control script.Do you want to enter a different location for the Apache binary or control script? [Y/n]
This warning is about to prevent you of properly installing the google sitemap generator on Debian Lenny or Debian Testing / Unstable Linux.
– To get around the issue and continuing with the installation, you will have to edit google sitemap generator install.sh script
Therein set or change the following variables in install.sh:
HTTPD_CONF="/etc/apache2/apache2.conf"
arg_apache_binary="/usr/sbin/apache2"
arg_apache_group="www-data"
arg_apache_conf="/etc/apache2/apache2.conf"
arg_apache_ctl="/usr/sbin/apache2ctl"
For your convenience I’ve also provided the working copy of google sitemap generator install.sh you can just download the install.sh and overwrite the original install.sh bundled with google sitemap generator beta1.
Further on start it up again and answer the required questions, from thence the install should succeed.
Afterwards be sure to enable port 8181 in your firewall, otherwise you won’t be able to access “googlesitemap generator web interfaceâ€.
Thereon to access google sitemap generator web interface and configure it for which domain names I desire to generate sitemaps as well as some other data relating the automated sitemap generations for my websites I pointed my IceWeasel browser to:
http://my-server.net:8181
Instead of a the nice login interface of google sitemap generator I faced:
Remote access is denied.
Make sure https is used if you want to access Google Sitemap Generator from remote IP. You can go to help center for how to enable https.
If you are on local machine, make sure you are not using proxy.
After some research online I was able to enable the remote access to Google Sitemap Generator web interface, I achieved that following the prescriptions in:
googlesitemapgenerator’s documentation Enable Google sitemap generator remote access
I have enabled the remote access to googlesitemapgenerator on Debian Lenny Linux via the command:
linux-server:~# /usr/local/google-sitemap-generator/bin/sitemap-daemon remote_admin enable
– Now access again the Google Sitemap Generator web interface, I’m convinced you will love it, since it’s heavily “google unifiedâ€.
I suggest you also take a look at a nice similar article to this one called Easy Google Sitemap Generation with SitemapGen
Hopefully this article is about to shed you some further light on how googlesitemapgenerator works and will help you to better understand Google’s program’s web interface.
