Writemaps is getting ready to blow up. I can feel it. Keep up the good work dude.

Posted by Jonathan Terranova  on  11/30  at  11:33 AM

Hey Scott,

Good work on this - we met once at Markup & Style in Boston and I had taken a look at WriteMaps back then, and just saw it written up on Boagworld.

Can you post an example of the XML output that your tool would generate?

Thanks!

Posted by Jeff L  on  11/30  at  01:02 PM

Hi Jeff
Good to hear from you. Thanks for checking out WriteMaps. A lot has changed since the M&SS meetup as we just launched version 1.0 and it’s pretty much a complete rewrite. If you get a chance to check it out, definitely let me know what you think.
So the XML output follows the sitemaps.org schema that can be used for Google and Yahoo. It spits out your data as url siblings but the hierarchy of sections is maintained in subtlety through the priority tags.

Here’s a sample output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://www.mysite.com/home</loc>1</priority><lastmod>2007-12-01</lastmod><changefreq>hourly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.mysite.com/about</loc>0.5</priority><lastmod>2007-12-01</lastmod><changefreq>hourly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.mysite.com/portfolio</loc>0.5</priority><lastmod>2007-12-01</lastmod><changefreq>hourly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.mysite.com/news</loc>0.5</priority><lastmod>2007-12-01</lastmod><changefreq>hourly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.mysite.com/contact</loc>0.5</priority><lastmod>2007-12-01</lastmod><changefreq>hourly</changefreq></url>
</urlset>

Posted by Scott  on  12/01  at  11:17 AM

p.s. sorry about the line wraps - it’ll vary browser to browser.

Posted by Scott  on  12/01  at  11:17 AM

Thanks Scott.

I played around with it for a few minutes today. Nice job. It seemed to get a bit confused in map view as I kept adding pages - it tried to move them around down further on the page. Everything went back to normal after I saved.

I wish the sitemap schema did have more to showcase hierarchy than just the priority tag, but that’s not your problem.

Posted by bruno1378  on  12/17  at  11:23 AM

Hi Bruno
I agree about the sitemap schema. It seems like it should have more of a nested structure. Then again, I suppose the purpose is to give bots a list of pages to crawl so in that aspect it works. Also, I could see how a nested XML hierarchy might not fit for a lot of sites.
I’m looking into the ‘confused’ issue - I’m pretty sure I know what’s causing that.
Thanks!

Posted by Scott  on  12/17  at  11:32 AM

It’s funny that with all of the brainpower of the IA and UX profession, there is still no killer app that does the job. It knows what I want to do… add pages to a sitemap. Not even Visio knows this. Even dedicated applications that were made for building sitemaps aren’t programmed to know automatically that you’re adding pages. Instead, you have to draw the boxes and add the connections.

Finally someone gets it. Writemaps gets it.

I do hear Omnigraffle does some great work, but Writemaps seems to be the best thing out there in terms of doing exactly what you want it to do.

Posted by Engelgrafik  on  04/25  at  09:49 AM