Seems that Hive7 is making its way into quite a few articles recently. I would classify this site as being a fairly interesting attempt at creating an online community. So probably your wondering what is all the hype about and is it worth your bother?

Well first of all it’s free!! (which in this world means its a must to check it out), but jokes aside seriously its a great site. As soon as you load up the page you find that you have been issued an avatar and a guest account. With these you are also assigned the rights to post lines onto the chat and also to drag character around the rooms which are available to you. Whilst browsing through these room you will notice other avatar which might be jumping around the page, these pertain to the other users who are currently viewing the page with you and whom you may chat with.

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So i decided after alot of pondering (i.e. 10 minutes spent talking to a hot mug of coffee) to give the new beta a try out. Well to be pretty honest I can’t really say that i was impressed. One of the more anticipated improvements in this version was the “new” tabular strucure which Microsoft finally for down to implementing.When i first opened Internet Explorer 7 i have to admint i was impressed by how clean it looked. Unfortunatly all the enthusiasm i was feeling faded no sooner i tried using the browser’s new interface. The browser feels extremly sluggish compared to Firefox or even Internet Explorer 6.

What surprised me the most in this new revision of browser was its page rendering engine. I have always found Internet Explorer have the widest share of sites which can be rendered properly by it. This time round it seems that a good number of sites that used to render very nicely in Internet Explorer 6 and also in other browsers such as Opera and Firefox now can’t be rendered on it any more.

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Site indexing has been the back bone of search engines since time immemorial. Search engines use indexers which crawl through websites and sore information about them inside the search engines database. Dynamic content is becoming ever more popular a design concept when implementing web sites. Traditional indexers tend to fail at indexing such sites because most of the content is generated at runtime rather than stored as separate files on the server.

Google have finally implemented a solution which might just about solve this problem. Google have opened to the public their new service which allows web administrators to issue an xml file to Google detailing their sites structure. Googlebot makes use of this file to learn how to crawl through designated website.

This solution should be very simple (and for once it actually is), but can prove to be quite problematic if the wrong approach is adopted. The trick to avoid adding extra complication to this process is to conjure up an intelligent way to generate these xml files. Google also introduced a system which allows the site administrator gzip the file containing the sitemap to reduce the amount to data that the Google will need to download.

The simplest way of writing these xml files would be to write them by hand. This would be fairly easy but hardly practical considering that small sites can sun into tens of dynamic pages and larger ones even into thousands and the person in charge of writing these files would have to adhere to the standard set by Google (which can be found here).

A more realistic way of generating sitemaps is to have a system which can automatically generate them for you. Earlier today i attempted to install a plugin written by Arne Brachhold for WordPress to add sitemap generation to this website. Needless to say the plugin is up and running and the site has already been picked up by Google Sitemaps. From the logs on the server i was able to determine that thanks to the sitemap file Googlebot was able to a magnificent job of crawling this blogger and I am looking forward to seeing the statistics that Google should be issuing to me.