YouTube monkeys?

I was browsing YouTube this evening, when an error occurred on the server and a message came up on the screen, which read as follows:

500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Etc.

I couldn't help laughing at that ... I like the response Google have shown, like ... hey, websites don't always behave and when they don't it's OK because it is being looked at and it will be up as soon as possible. If only everybody was as laid back as that when it came to website/server errors (within reason of course!).

Just remember folks, there are no guarantees that something won't happen to your website at some point in it's digital lifetime, because no matter how wonderful that SLA agreement looks on paper, it is just paper ... it's the mechanical bits, and the server software, you need to worry about.

Screenshot:

Google sitemap

I recently decided to find out how to go about submitting an XML sitemap file to Google. It all kicked off when I received an email from DMXZone.com telling me about some of their new extensions. One of them is a free extension called Google Sitemap Generator.

I promptly downloaded the extension and set to work, and here's how things went:

1. Install the Google Sitemap Generator extension.
2. Fire up Dreamweaver and run the extension.
3. Enter your URL in full, e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com
4. Enter your home page, e.g. index.html
5. Click Generate and your done.

I then discovered in a users comment on DMXZone that the header information in the XML file was out of date, showing this info:

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"

I did some more digging on the net, and found out this is what the above data should have been:

xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"

So I replaced the data, moving onto the next step, which is to submit the sitemap file to Google. But first, I uploaded the file to the root of the website. At the same time, I created a robots.txt file specifying the sitemap file, like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

It turns out there are several ways to submit the file, or at least make search engines aware of it. The method I used was to ping it to Google, like this:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Google notifies you via the browser that your submission has been successful, and that it will crawl it soon.

Now wait...