Generating SiteInfo with MT
On the A9 Developer weblog there is an article today on he SiteInfo feature that was until now only available when you used the A9 Toolbar. They now have developed a Firefox extension that will give you the same functionality. Normally the siteinfo tab gives you the Alexa information about a site: traffic ranking, reviews, etc., and it presents you with a short “people that visit this site also visit …” list of sites. However if you go to IBM.com or Amazon.com you will see that this tab changes into a site navigation menu. The posting on the A9 weblog today and an earlier posting in September give some other examples.
You can control this through the generation of a sitinfo.xml file, to be placed in the root directory of your website. The details of the file format are in the SiteInfo Spec. I added a template to my moveable type installation that automatically generates this with a menu for the last postings, categories, etc.
My moveable type template for this can be downloaded from here. Set it up as a new template to generate a file siteinfo.xml on rebuild.
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Well, the template kept barfing for me on the second half - the XML wasn't valid, at least for MT version 3.0. I had to comment out anything with "/MT..." in it because it confused the xml display. Also, it does not generate my categories, even though I have them.
Is there something I left out?
You might be happy to hear, that there now also is a SiteInfo Plugin for WordPress.
I find the idea behind the siteinfo.xml interesting.
You could say SiteInfo is for the user what Google Sitemap is for the server.
One can bypass clumsy “designer” menus and Adobe Flash hurdles. Useful!
However I think that it should be integrated into the header via or sth. like that.