Sunday, February 18, 2007

Web heartburn and updates

Regular visitors and subscribers to my Web site and related feeds probably saw an obscene amount of weirdness and activity on my site this weekend.

First and worse, the site was down for most of Saturday, thanks to an outage from my Web hosting company that made my site and domain-related Email unavailable.

This really sucks, because the Saturday after I send out my traditional Biz Valentine's cards is usually a huge traffic day for me. So, thanks, Earthlink -- you cost me marketing opportunity.

The other craziness is I finally built out my sitemaps (XML and HTML) and formally loaded them into Yahoo and Google. They've got some great tools for Web administrators.

Speaking of great tools, I found a free sitemap generator that rocks. It's not perfect, but it's free, and once I figured out a few of the idiosyncrasies, it saved me a ton of time. Click the icon below to check it out yourself.

Sitemap Generator

Doing sitemaps right isn't trivial. I spent a ton of timing cleaning up dead links, republish blog entries that weren't migrated correctly by Google when they purchased and upgraded Blogger.com, making sure annoying stuff (spacer images, etc.) weren't included in the sitemap, etc. This meant there was a lot of republishing of blog entries and related RSS, atom, etc. news blasts. Sorry.

Finally, I added my new blog about toys to the right side "I'm [whatevering]" sidebar, "Blogs" sub listings, and Feed pages.

Oh, and I updated my copyright to 2007. Like you care.

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