Sitemaps with nanoc

Using Sitemaps on your website might be quite beneficial for your SEO, especially if you want to get quickly indexed by major search engines. According to Wikipedia:

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Let’s have a look how to generate Sitemaps with nanoc. We start by adding the following line to lib/defaults.rb

include Nanoc3::Helpers::XMLSitemap

Next, we have to set up a base url for our website, by adding the following line to config.yaml

base_url: http://mywebsite.com

Now we can create a sitemap page with the following content:

= xml_sitemap

In this example I’m using HAML as a template language.

Last step is to adjust Rules file to handle the sitemap file accordingly

compile 'sitemap' do
  filter :haml
end
 
route 'sitemap' do
  item.identifier.chop + '.xml'
end

Once compiled and deployed, Sitemaps can be accessed at /sitemap.xml of your website.