Aimy Sitemap now contains a new translation
to Spanish, improves the handling of
missing Last-Modified information and in the PRO version features
automatic periodic crawls.
Updated Translations
Aimy Sitemap got translated to Spanish - thanks to Marcelo Ferro for teaching Aimy Sitemap another tongue!
Improved Last-Modified Handling
Aimy Sitemap's crawler evaluates the Last-Modified HTTP header field to
determine a document's modification time.
In some setups (i.e. a webserver behind a reverse proxy) this field is not always provided as appropriate. Therefore it could happen that a once set modification time was wiped out. Aimy Sitemap's indexer therefore now uses an improved algorithm to only update the modifcation time if it is reasonable.
Aimy Sitemap Companion
So, where's Aimy Sitemap Companion? Short answer first: It's gone.
Aimy Sitemap has been designed from the ground up to be a crawler based sitemap tool. Aimy Sitemap Companion would require a different approach to be implemented in addition. After thinking this through more than once we decided to stick to the crawler based design as we consider it having benefits compared to other approaches out there.
To address the feature requests we've got over the last few month we decided to implement a feature that works alike, but sticks to Aimy Sitemap's design: Automatic Periodic Crawls.
Automatic Periodic Crawls (PRO feature)
This new feature allows you to automatically let Aimy Sitemap crawl
and index your website from time to time.
You can customize the actions to be
taken when new or updated content is found on your website to automatically
update your sitemap.xml file on disk and optionally
notify your preferred search engines afterwards.
How does it work? Aimy Sitemap provides a command line script
(crawl-website.php) that manages the interaction of Aimy Sitemap's crawler,
indexer and notifier. This script can be executed by either the cron
(Unix) or Task Scheduler (Windows) system service.
Focus on your content and let Aimy Sitemap pick up all changes and take action automatically as soon as the periodic script is executed for the next time!
What happened? During regular crawls in Aimy Sitemap's "Crawl Website" view you get live feedback on what the crawler is doing. The periodic script is running unattended, maybe at night when you are asleep - but you will find detailed information on the last crawl in Joomla!'s backend as soon as the periodic crawl finishes. Aimy Sitemap's "Periodic Crawl" view by default shows you a short report of the last crawl, accompanied with any error that may have occurred:
...as well as a long, detailed report of all changes done to your index:
...and even the complete output of the crawl is captured and available for review:
To find out more, have a look at Aimy Sitemap's User Manual and have a look at how to set up periodic crawls with Microsoft's Task Scheduler if you are using a Windows server to run your Joomla! website.