SEO being an interest of mine, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around releasing a webapp without a sitemap. The problem is that there aren’t any really great sitemap plugins for Rails. Now I will grant that creating a sitemap in Rails is a challenging proposition and one that I would not like to undertake on my own unless absolutely necessary. But I was hoping that there would be a rails sitemap “killer app” like there is with almost everything else in Rails.
So I dove in and tried a few options until I found one that worked. First I wrote some code to generate an XML file and then created a sitemap_index.xml.gz file by hand. This was very kludgy and definitely not a permanent solution. I had also read suggestions about doing it in a sitemap_controller.rb file, but that seemed just as kludgy as using a view to generate the XML. It was then time to explore the plugin world.
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