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- Hit President Bush with your shoes! Do it!
- A new online accounting system called Clear Books
- TalkOn.it keeps growing!
- Celebrity Generator Test #1
- Livetodot is the cheapest domain name provider in the UK
- New Airport Guides Take Off
- New TalkOn.it Websites
- Sitemap Validation
- What's next for Travel Insurance Guide?
- How to find a travel insurance policy
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New TalkOn.it Websites
Posted 2:50 PM Tuesday September 23, 2008 by Matt Godwin
Hi Everyone, My name is Matt Godwin and I am one of the website developers for Fubra. I have been working here for over two years now and I am the developer behind the TalkOn.it Network.
Ever since we launched TalkOn.it back in July 2007, the network has mainly focused on Sports and now boasts 46 dedicated websites. It has always been our plan to launch new websites covering different topics in the future.
After a while of developing the network and the forums we feel it is now a good time to start launching some new websites covering Motoring and Technology.
For our Technology websites we have launched Talk Mobiles, Talk HDTV and Talk Consoles. Whilst with Motoring we are aiming to create a website for each major car manufacturers, starting with Ford and Subaru with more currently in the works like Ferrari and Mercedes.
So come over and take a look at our new sites and tell us what you think and keep an eye out for new car websites coming out in the near future!
Sitemap Validation
Posted 4:31 PM Wednesday September 17, 2008 by Alex Buell
Introduction
Hello, my name is Alex Buell, I am profoundly deaf, and work as a Linux system administrator within the Fubra infosphere. I usually spend most of my time working on open source projects, giving back to the community extra value in tools that allow us to do our job.
What are sitemaps?
They provide a way for webmasters (people who run websites) to give out information about the content on their websites. Search engines (i.e. www.google.co.uk) look ('crawling') through websites to build up indexes to allow people to search for things that they are interested in looking for.
Essentially a sitemap is just a file containing URLs in XML format, along with additional metadata about each of these URLs (when was it last updated, how often does it change, how vital it is), enabling search engines to make intelligent decisions about searching for links to or from pages on the web sites.
Sitemaps have to be regularly updated so we have a tool that automatically generate sitemaps which are stored within the web site, search engines can download these files and read through all the URLs.
A new tool for validating sitemaps
We at Fubra have developed a web tool to help with validating sitemaps on our websites. The tool does two things; reads the sitemap files off the website, and presents to us in a human readable form, and if asked, check through the URLs, displaying the http code (i.e. 404, 301, or 200) in the status icons on the right side.
How to use the Validator webtool
To use the tool, point your browser at the Sitemap Validator site, and type in the URL (i.e. www.talkfootball.co.uk), and see what the tool does with it.
As it stands, the validator tool will look through the URLs and its associated metadata for validity and colour the icon on the right accordingly. Red icons means that the URL is a duplicate, orange means the date and time associated with the URL is invalid, whilst green means that the URL and its metadata is valid. The tool sorts the URLs in a way that all invalid URLs comes first and all valid URLs comes last. This makes it easy to see what is wrong with the sitemap.
Additionally, there is a button 'Check' in the top row, which, if clicked upon, will run a check on all the URLs on the site, and display the http code.
Any other business?
All comments, flames and feedback welcome, please do drop me an email at alex at fubra dot com