Sitemap Notifier: Ruby on Rails plugin for notifying search engines of changes to sitemap

lassebunk — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:08:16 +0000

Sitemap Notifier is a Ruby on Rails plugin that, when installed, automatically notifies Google, Bing, and Yahoo of changes to your models, i.e. changes to your sitemap. It also works in conjunction with the Dynamic Sitemaps plugin.

Installation

In Rails 3:

$ rails plugin install git://github.com/lassebunk/sitemap_notifier.git

Example

Start by generating initializer and route:

$ rails generate sitemap_notifier sitemap_notifier

In config/initializers/sitemap_notifier.rb:

# wait 10 minutes between notifications
SitemapNotifier::Notifier.delay = 600

# replace this with your own url
SitemapNotifier::Notifier.sitemap_url = "http://example.com/sitemap.xml"

After installation

After you install and configure the plugin, it’ll automatically notify Google, Bing, and Yahoo every time you update a model. After each notification, it’ll wait 10 minutes (by default) before notifying again. This is to ensure that for example a batch update won’t trigger an equal amount of notifications.

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Dynamic Sitemaps: Ruby on Rails sitemap plugin

lassebunk — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:15:53 +0000

Dynamic Sitemaps enables you to easily create flexible, dynamic sitemaps in Ruby on Rails. It generates sitemaps in the sitemaps.org standard which is supported by several crawlers including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If the sitemap has more than 50.000 urls – or whatever you set it to using per_page – the plugin will automatically split the sitemap into smaller chunks and generate a sitemap index as specified at sitemaps.org.

To install in Rails 3:

rails plugin install git://github.com/lassebunk/dynamic_sitemaps.git

Generate initializer and route:

$ rails generate dynamic_sitemaps sitemap.xml

In config/initializers/sitemap.rb:

Sitemap::Map.draw do

  # default page size is 50.000 which is the specified maximum at http://sitemaps.org.
  per_page 10

  url root_url, :last_mod => DateTime.now, :change_freq => 'daily', :priority => 1

  new_page!

  Product.all.each do |product|
    url product_url(product), :last_mod => product.updated_at, :change_freq => 'monthly', :priority => 0.8
  end

  new_page!

  autogenerate  :products, :categories,
                :last_mod => :updated_at,
                :change_freq => 'monthly',
                :priority => 0.8

  new_page!

  autogenerate  :users,
                :last_mod => :updated_at,
                :change_freq => lambda { |user| user.very_active? ? 'weekly' : 'monthly' },
                :priority => 0.5

end

You are now able to access your sitemap at http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

In public/robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

And at last submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.