Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I have added a new sitemap page to my site. A number of people have asked me about the availability of a sitemap over the last year to make it easier to find pages. I also had emails from some users of Konqueror who told me the menus I used do not behave correctly in this browser. I added links in my copyright notice at the bottom of the page sometime back but when I added a lot of new menu items and pages recently I decided to not update the copyright notice further to add links - Its getting too big.

So i decided to hunt around on Sunday night for a free Perl script that could generate a site map for me. This seemed to be more difficult than I expected. I found three candidates, I am sure there are many more out there but these are what I found after an hour or so of searching. The first was a very simple script that unfortunately didn't drill down correctly through the sites directories so I abandoned that one almost immediately. The second was more substantial and was called sitemapper version 1.019. This looked like a good option but proved to be too big a time spinner to get it running. It needs a large amount of modules to be pre-installed and as my ISP didn't have them installed that meant messing with the script to run local versions. I got it running but was not happy with the maintainability of it so i abandoned it.

The final script i downloaded was sitemap.pl - The site seems to have a problem this evening though. This script was much simpler and up and running quickly. I only needed to add configuration information and change the template to match my site. This then generated a map but all the links had the same text. This is because it uses the text held in the title tags. hmmm... so i set about and changed the perl to use the H1 tags instead.

The sitemap is now up and running. Hopefully it will be useful to visitors to find what they need. Its available on the "About" menu or directly here.