Major XML Sitemap Generator services overhaul
Having been quiet for most of 2023, we are now at a point where we are preparing to relaunch and upgrade many of our services and set out on a new footing as we head in to 2024 ….
We’ve undergone what is an enormous amount of work restructuting and replatforming the business to enable us to move forward on a more stable, maintainable and scalable platform.
This blog provides an overview of the key things that are happening and we’ll post more detailed blogs over the coming weeks.
Why?
This whole enterprise started off in 2004 as a series of scripts and processes to make automating web development to expidiate web development for clients. Over time these scripts have morphed in to software products and online services, and then the addition of things like our wordpress plugin, again, intuially developed for our own projects and a few clients.
As popularity has grown and our user base has gotten larger we have found it increasingly difficult to keep on top of maintenance and support across the piste and a new approach was needed.
Website(s)
Our application and marketing website become closely intertwined over the years and this became a real pain to maintain and risky. Our diversification of products and services also meant that our messaging, support etc. got messy.
As such we took the decision to split out our website content and use some new tooling to maintain the content separately to the applications. We also decided to split out our products and blog content to make it more accessible and relvant to a given audience.
The old app / website will be maintained for posterity, in the short term, and we’ll ulitmately phase them out.
We hope our new website is simpler, much more responsive, and also with greater privacy. We’ve decided not to use cookies and don’t track individual users on our website, which helps us avoid those annoying warnings and consent banners and popups.
Online XML Sitemap Generator
This has been our biggest undertaking and learning curve. For many years this was built on Microsoft technology, starting it’s life in early 2000’s on Visual Basic and over time migrating to .Net. Naturally it was VB.Net but many parts of it transition to C#, but inevitably we still end up with a mix of code bases and respositories, not to mention the additional cost of dealing with Microsoft vs open source.
As such we took the decision to re-write our entire product stack in Javascript (using Typescript). We’ve seen some significant performance gains doing this, not necessarily due to Javascript, but re-architecting how we do things. We recognise there are likely bugs which over the coming months will be flushed out as websites start to use this new service.
We’ll maintain the legacy service in to early 2024, and priortise supporting existing customers moving over to the new platform and ensuring thy are receiving a stable service before shutting down the old service.
- (Legacy application)[https://legacy.xmlsitemapgenerator.org]
- (New application)[https://app.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/sitemaps/free]
WordPress Sitemap Plugin
At our peak we had over 100,000 downloads on the Wordpress plugin store. After removing the plugin from the Wordpress directory in 2022 due to the overhead of dealing with Wordpress, we have continued to maintain the plugin via our website with many of our original users continuing to use it today. The plugin will continue to be available and maintained.
We have been improving the help and support materials as part of our website updates and hope to bring exciting new updates to the plugin in 2024.
G-Mapper for Windows
G-Mapper our downloadable XML Sitemap Generator for Windows remains popular, and will continue to be available. Our intention is to replace it with a new version that is more integrated with our other services and code to make it easier to maintain. We’ll be adding some new features to our online version over the coming months and we’ll then package a for desktop applications.
Due to our new code base we hope to be able to deploy not only to Windows, but to Mac and Linux.
In the meantime, to free up time and resources, G-Mapper will no longer be officially supported. We’ll try to be helpful where we can, in particular existing users and donors, but the product will not be enhanced moving forward.
As with our online services, the priority will be supporting our existing users with the migration from G-Mapper to the new application, which will likely be in 2024.
Other online services
Our other online services such as diagnostics and ping tools will be available on the new app site.