Site Maps

Site maps can help search engines like Google and Yahoo search your site more effectively. Friday can create a site map for you.

Learn more about Google Site Maps here and about sitemaps in general at Sitemaps.org

To begin, add these two lines to your FRIDAY.FQA file:

[GoogleSiteMap]
MakeMap=YES

Whenever you click the Create button, Friday regenerates a sitemap file named
sitemap.xml and stored in your FAQ's HTML folder.

To create sitemap.xml, Friday uses a template file called sitemap.txt.

It looks for this file in your FAQ's FAQ folder; if the file's not there, it creates one automatically. This means that you can modify the existing sitemap.txt file if you wish, once you've allowed Friday to create it once.

When Friday creates a site map file, it automatically adds XML to the list of Upload file types in Friday.FQA; this way it'll upload the sitemap.xml file along with the rest of your FAQ files.

Notes

Friday automatically supplies and/or updates the and fields specified by Google. It defaults to monthly and 0.5 but you can change these by editing sitemap.txt in your FAQ folder.

Friday applies the same ChangeFreq and Priority values to all pages in your FAQ.
It doesn't support per-entry values for either of these.

Friday doesn't automatically "escape" any special characters like Ampersand, Single/Double Quotes, GreaterThan, LessThan signs that appear in the URLs it adds to sitemap.xml. If you avoid these characters and accents/umlauts etc. in the path names on your server and in Friday's base answer file names, there should be no problems.

In order for Friday to supply a full URL to the files on your site, it needs the full URL to the folder where your FAQ files will be uploaded. You can supply this by adding a URLPrefix= line to the [WebSite] section of Friday.FQA:

[WebSite]
URLPrefix=http://www.rdpslides.com/friday/tutorial/

Don't forget to add the forward slash to the end of this prefix!

Friday's default sitemap.txt template looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<BEGIN>
  <url>
    <loc>:URL:</loc>
    <lastmod>4/30/2009</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
<END>
</urlset>

This form is acceptable to Google, but if you want to include the sitemap in your robots.txt file, we recommend you edit sitemap.txt to this instead:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  < urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<BEGIN>
   < url>
    < loc>:URL:</loc>
    < lastmod>4/30/2009</lastmod>
    < changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    < priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>  
<END>
  </urlset>

Naturally, all content & site maintenance by

Friday The Automatic FAQ Maker