For the Developer

Sitemaps just make sense. You create a Sitemap file, or a set of files and a Sitemap Index, that has all the your site links crafted purely for search engine consumption. It’s like candy for the search giants since they get spoon-fed your site structure by you. Not only can it tell them where your content is, but it can tell them how often it changes, when it was last changed, and what priority it is to your site. Pure confection!

But the problem, for me at least, was finding the urls to ping so that you are not waiting for the giants to get a sweet tooth and come looking for you. The page on informing giants talks about a magical searchengine_URL that can be replace by your supporting giant. The problem: the site never tells what searchengine_URLs exist for your giant companions.

After some searching I finally found the urls that I was looking for. Where did I find the mystical urls you ask? Well it wasn’t from a google search (returned a lot of non-helpful links), it was from a wordpress plugin. In my opinion it is not a very good way to promote a service that is supposed to make it easier for you to get your content into the giants’ mouths.

Without further ado here are the urls that should work for sending your updated Sitemap to the search giants:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=<url>
• http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=<url>
• http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=<url>
• http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=<Yahoo! Developer Key>&url=<url>

I would also suggest reading the other options for informing the search engines, such as adding ‘Sitemap: <url>’ to your robots.txt file and actually visiting to the giants’ playground.

Something that really bugged me (and still does) about the ubuntu since I installed it is that eclipse is not even close to being the latest version in the package manager. That just seems really strange to me to have such and awesome and widely used IDE not supported in Ubuntu. Anyhow I am not writing this post to just complain about Ubuntu’s quirks, I am writing to detail the steps that I took to get it setup and working on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 bit box.

Using the Sun Java

I started off by doing your standard Google search and came up with this page listed promently on the Ubuntu community site:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EclipseIDE

I followed the instructions to get the Java 6 from Sun installed on the system. But I stopped after the install of Java 6 since my install is basically a download of eclipse it wasn’t going to have the /etc/eclipse/java_home that was described on the community page.

With a little more searching I came across this page which gave a brief description his installation. From his post I edited my ~/.bashrc file and added in the export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/ so that my default JAVA_HOME would be the sun java.

Getting Eclipse

To get the latest eclipse distribution I went to the eclipse download page and downloaded the eclipse classic, my preferred base distro. Once I had the file I extracted the eclipse directory. I’m not a linux guru and didn’t know the ‘best’ place to put the eclipse directory so i put it in /opt/.

Running Eclipse

Once I had the application in the directory I decided to add it to my applications menu. I did so by right clicking on the ‘Applications’ menu and selecting the ‘Edit Menus’ option. From there I went into the Applications > Programming menu on the left side and created a ‘New Item’. I chose the type of ‘Application’ and a name of ‘Eclipse’. For the command I entered ‘/opt/eclipse/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java’ just to make sure that eclipse was being loaded with the correct jvm.

Using Eclipse

So far I have not had any problems with any of the plugins that I commonly use (CFEclipse, Subclipse, etc) that aren’t found on all system.

That’s what I did to get Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede running on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron, so enjoy!