<\/p>\n
At the beginning of June, I wrote about how the race had started<\/a> to produce a WordPress plugin to support Google Sitemaps.<\/p>\n Two days later, I declared a race winner<\/a>. Of the 161 search results, Michael Nguyen at Social Patterns<\/a> was the first to meet the basic judging criteria<\/a>. Over three months have passed without follow-up, and now there are over 27,000 search hits<\/a>.<\/p>\n Let’s look at the players now.<\/p>\n Nguyen has backed out of the race explaining that:<\/p>\n I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be writing a plugin for this since Arne Brachhold has already written a great one<\/a>. Thanks Arne.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Arne Brachhold<\/a> certainly is a strong contender with his plugin, Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress V2<\/a> – one which was first available just a day after Nguyen’s. So close!<\/p>\n Brachhold’s solution meets all of the judging criteria:<\/p>\n Full marks – and full bonus marks – to Arne Brachhold!<\/strong><\/p>\n Both Rodney Schupe<\/a> and Sci7<\/a> offer PHP scripts (Schupe’s file<\/a> and Sci7’s file<\/a>) that will generate a Google Sitemap from the WordPress database. They are each very similar to the original winner from SocialPatterns, and suffer from similar problems.<\/p>\n I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone of being a spammer on my blog. One does not do that in polite company, does one? It is not seemly<\/em>. Perhaps we need a euphemism that is more socially acceptable than “spammer”?<\/p>\n The other day, when discussing a legal puzzle about libel<\/a> with friends, I used the example of accusing someone of “interfering with elephants”. I used that example for several reasons: because it was clearly an outrageous claim that couldn’t be believed, it was also clearly obscene, and yet – somehow – it didn’t have any rude words in it that would immediately offend the parents of eavesdropping 4-year-olds.<\/p>\n How odd, that I somehow find it more comfortable to accuse someone of improper behaviour with a large animal than of sending unsolicited email to large numbers of people?<\/p>\n Sci7 Ltd are a bunch of elephant-interferers. They tend to interfere with elephants in the direction of employees of certain high-tech industries. They offer to “enable you to contact” hundreds of thousands of people in various industries. While their expertise is in “data-mining”, the purpose of that data-mining becomes clear when you here they are looking for programmers who can work on projects like “writing custom web-scraping scripts in perl”.<\/p>\n I prefer not to have elephants interfered with – and, indeed, I have produced a WordPress plugin to help protect email-addresses – and elephants, for that matter – from web-scraping perl scripts<\/a>. I strongly considered not linking to the Sci7 site, but that seemed a bit childish.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Looking through the first few pages of the Google search, there didn’t appear to be any more contenders, so I am happy to declare Brachhold’s plugin to the be the new winner – perhaps not quite the first, but clearly the best. Oddthinking now has Arne’s plugin installed and producing its own sitemap.<\/a> Thanks Arne!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A review of WordPress plugins for Google Sitemaps<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,31,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking","category-geek","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAt the time, I said I would cover the race again in a week’s time.<\/p>\nSocial Patterns<\/h3>\n
Arne Brachhold<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Other Contenders<\/h3>\n
Aside: Offensive Behaviour and Sci7<\/h5>\n
New Winner<\/h3>\n