The Sitemap is the Holy Grail of a website. It’s the sheet (or sheets) of xml that new webmasters don’t know to use and some experienced webmasters neglect to create. Consider that every website has a front, a back, a mouthpiece, a gang of security guards and a guide. Visitors see the front, the webmaster uses the backend to create the front, the RSS feed tells the world what’s happening at the website, robots.txt and other little bits help protect it, and the sitemap guides search engine spiders around the it.

Usually, if you use a content management system (CMS) you will be blessed with automatic sitemap generation either through an inbuilt process or a plugin. In which case, you only need to locate it, submit it to search engines, link to it from your index page or the footer of every page, and regularly ping it to tell search engines about updates to it. You will usually find your sitemap sitting comfortably close to your robots.txt at the root of your domain e.g. your-domain.com/sitemap.xml

If you are not blessed with automatic sitemap generation and submission then you will need to create your own sitemap. Of course, that is what this article is all about and below here are the instructions your should follow to do that.

Most often, a sitemap needs to be manually created when a website is hand crafted in (x)html or when a sitemap is to be remotely hosted (i.e. the sitemap is placed on a different domain or server to the website it maps as is frequently the case when a sponsor provides a co-brand or white label site but not enough space or facility to host a sitemap. You can learn how to split a domain across multiple hosts in this EasyGuide.

There are programs and scripts that can be used to generate sitemaps. These can be split into two categories: those that work and those that don’t work. Pedants might point out that a third category exists which includes those that only work when they feel like it or after a lot of flirtatious smooth-talking, as is often the case.

Those sitemap generators that do work can be subdivided into two subcategories:

• those that run from a desktop PC, and
  
• those that run from a web server.

And they may be subdivided into paid and free. Guess which we’re going to work with

Most of the free sitemap tools that work from a desktop PC are the same ones used to check for dead links. You should read How to Check for Deadlinks to learn more about them because I am not going to discuss them here. More often than not the “sitemaps” created by those programs need to be  manually edited into an xml sitemap format, for example, the URLs

http://journalxtra.com/downloads/

http://journalxtra.com/tools/

Would become:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
 xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<!-- The site URLs go below here -->

<url>
 <loc>http://journalxtra.com/downloads/</loc>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://journalxtra.com/tools/</loc>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

</urlset>

The Scriptilitious ScriptBox is free and comes with a sitemap-maker utility that make it easy convert those URLs into a sitemap. You can get it by clicking the download button at the end of this article. I advise you to use klinkstatus (or similar) to index a website from your desktop then to use Scriptilitious to convert the indexed URLs into an xml sitemap. There is a a rumor that klinkstatus will soon have a specific template for xml sitemap creation which is good news for webmasters who use Linux (like me). Unfortunately, neither of these programs is yet capable of automatically uploading a sitemap to a server.

So let’s take a look at the working, free online sitemap generators:

There are many scripts that can be uploaded to a web server and configured to automatically rebuild a sitemap and submit it to various search engines. Unfortunately, and they are incredibly awkward to set up and configure; plus, for security reasons, many of them will only map a website that is on the domain where the script is being used. That restriction prohibits them from being used to create sitemaps for remote sites.

A better option is to use free online sitemap generators. They work, they are not limited to one website, they don’t care whether you own the site being mapped and they can be used frequently. There is one catch: most limit their free maps to either 500, 1000 or 5000 URLs and only map URLs that can be reached from the root (index) page of a website. The ones I use are no exception:

• xml-sitemaps.com will generate a well formatted xml sitemap of up to 500 URLs,
• sitemaps-builder.com generates a map with up to 1,000 URLs, and
• PC Time Limit builds sitemaps of upto 5,000 links.

Those three sitemap generators are more than enough for most sites but what if you have a co-brand, white label or hand-crafted website that updates daily and has hundreds of thousands of pages that must be indexed? How might all those lovely URLs be indexed?

Think about this:

A list of the most recent URLs is created when you generate a sitemap. When a new web page is created a new URL is created which must be added to that map. If you start out with 1,000 URLs and add 10 new URLs every day then over 20 days another 200 URLs must be mapped. If a sitemap generator maps only the first 1000 URLs it encounters from a website’s index page and there are 1200 URLs to index then 200 URLs will be missed out of the map. An incomplete map is bad news. An incomplete map could result in a site being poorly indexed by search engines.

Is there a way to coax the online generators to create a bigger sitemap?

Fortunately, sitemap generators do not check the size of a current sitemap and cannot determine whether a sitemap is made up from the contents of multiple sitemaps that have been generated by free sitmap generators. This failing can be turned to our advantage: we can use the same free tools to create daily or weekly sitemaps then combine their results to build one super sitemap. We can then force the generator to map different parts of a website by putting links to those parts on the website’s index page. For best results, one of those links should point to an artificial linklist that points to the sections of the site that need to be mapped; but, we must be careful not to duplicate data lines!

The Method

The method is easy for those who use Linux. I do not know whether Windows comes with “sed” but Windows users can use VirtualBox, a Linux LiveDisk, or they can install CygWin (Cygwin or CygwinX). These instructions assume you have already placed strategic links on your site’s front (index) page that point to the deeper parts of your website or a linklist that contains deeplinks to those parts you wish to have mapped. Strategic links should be as close to the top of the index page as possible (machines read webpages top-to-bottom, left-to-right). You can make your life easier my using the automated sitemap-ripper utility that comes with Scriptilitious. Again, Scriptilitious can be downloaded at the bottom of this article. So, here’s how we create a sitemap using online generators and (or not) the free sitemap-ripper utility:

1. Use one of the sitemap generation tools listed above. Sometimes the generators can be mistaken for DoS attacks and hack attempts so they can be blocked by server security software. My general route is to try 5,000 then 1000 then 500 URLs. The latter one is rarely ever blocked;
2. Upload the sitemap to your server. It should usually be placed in the root directory e.g. your-domain.com/sitemap.xml;
3. Register the sitemap with the big two search engines (Google and Bing (and Yahoo));
4. Place a link to the sitemap in the footer of your site’s index page (I suggest the footer because, most often, the same footer is repeated on every page). This ensures that Yahoo! and other search engines can easily find the sitemap;
5. If possible, place a link to your sitemap in robots.txt by adding this line to it:
   

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

6. Use My Page Rank to ping the major search engines with the details of your sitemap;
7. To update the sitemap, use one of the sitemap generation tools but instead of overwriting the old sitemap with the newly created one, combine their contents. You can do this with sitemap-ripper or with this little bit of code:
   1. Place the content of both sitemaps (old and new) into one file called sitemap.xml.
   2. Open a terminal (Bash/Konsole/Console) and type or copy and paste this script into it

   sed -i 's#^[ t]*##g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#http://www.#http://#g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#http://#http://www.#g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#<url>##g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#</url>##g' sitemap.xml
   grep "<loc>" sitemap.xml > extracted.xml
   sort -u extracted.xml > sorted.txt
   rm sitemap.xml
   rm extracted.xml
   mv sorted.txt sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#<url><url>#<url>#g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#<loc>#<url>n  <loc>#g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i 's#</loc>#</loc>n  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>n  <priority>0.5</priority>n</url>#g' sitemap.xml
   sed -i.bak '1i <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>n<urlsetn      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"n      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"n      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9n      http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">n      <!-- The site URLs go below here -->n      <!-- formatted with a script from http://journalxtra.com/downloads -->n' sitemap.xml
   echo '</urlset>' >> sitemap.xml
   rm sitemap.xml.bak

   3. That code removes superfluous whitespace at the beginning of all lines, changes all URLs to the http://www format, sorts the data, removes duplicate content, extracts all the mapped URLs, sets their priority to “0.5″ and specifies their frequency of change as “daily”. The final file it creates is the all important sitemap.xml. The downloadable script is more interactive, allows URL format, the change frequency, and page priority to be specified as it runs – plus it automatically combines the original sitemaps before it rips them apart, extracts the URLs, cleans them up, removes duplicates and reformats them into our Holy Grail.
8. Repeat step 7 then 6 every time a new sitemap is generated.

Ensure that your URLs use only one of the http:// or http://www formats. If you’re URLs are mixed then the pages could be indexed twice or thrice which could be rewarded with a search engine penalty and lower page rank due to different backlinks pointing to different pages (http:// is different to http://www.)

If you cannot be bothered to do all the above, for as little as $19.99 you can get a sitemap generator that will create as many sitemaps as you need as big as you need them. It’s available from xml-sitemaps.com, provides automatic sitemap updates and will save you a lot of time.

Scripilitious

This free interactive utility box comes with two sitemap creation scripts that automate step 7 to produce a sitemap with the name sitemap.xml. Scriptilitious is known to work with Linux it might work natively with Windows but most likely will require Cygwin or some other Linux terminal emulator.

Instructions

1. Unzip the downloaded file,
2. Place the two sitemaps that need to be combined into the WorkBox folder (give them both a different name),
3. Open a terminal in Scriptilitious folder and type ./scriptilitious.sh
   
4. Further usage instructions are provided as the script runs.

Scriptilitious ScriptBox (78)

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

“What? Why would I want to do that?” I hear you shout.

Picture this:

you’ve joined an affiliate program and your sponsor provides you with a hosted free site. You register your domain name, point it to your sponsor’s server then set up your free website. A few days later you think about marketing it. You visit lots of directories and send back link requests to hundreds of webmasters but everywhere you turn you see a great massive big bolder blocking your path. You approach it, inspect it and see some words written on it in BIG, BOLD RED LETTERS:

Reciprocal Link Required

You think, Mmm, O.K, I’ll put the recips in my website’s footer and when that’s full I’ll stick them in my sidebar.

So you get out your hammer and bolster and start chipping away at it.  After a few days of chipping you finally break through the last of the bolder. As it splits into two pieces you step onto the other side of the path, exclaim “Phew! That was hard work” then sit down in exhaustion. Just before you close your eyes to relax you notice all the chippings you’ve left on the path, What a mess, you think to yourself, How am I going to clear that up?

Well, how are you going to clear it up?

How about this:

create a remotely hosted sub domain of your site, preferably on your own server, and install a directory, blog, gallery or whatever else your sponsor provided white label site needs.

Believe me when I say this, it is far easier to do than it sounds; and you will need to do this whenever you need to spread a domain name across free sites provided by your sponsors, blogs provided by free blog services and your own paid for server space.

In this guide I will show how to point your sub domains to servers other than the server your main domain (your top level domain) points toward.

You will need

• 1 registered domain name
• access to your domain name registrar’s control panel
  
• 1 server that isn’t connected to the one your top level domain, TLD, points at

The Set-Up

We will pretend we have a TLD called

example.com (http://example.com)

We will create a sub domain called

subdomain.example.com (http://subdomain.example.com)

We will host example.com on Server 1 and the sub domain on Server 2.

We will assume that example.com already points to Server 1 with a set-up similar to this (the left hand side is the Host Name, the right hand side is the server detail):

A-NAME or A-ADDRESS

* = 123.456.789.10

@ = 123.456.789.10

www = 123.456.789.10

A-NAMEs point to the IP address of the target server

CNAME or Name Server (NS)

ns123.server-one.com.

ns124.server-one.com.

CNAMEs point to the target server’s Name Server

The full stop after the “com” is necessary for the CNAME. Some registrars auto add it so might not like the Name Server if you add the dot. Use the dot first, if the registrar spits it out, try it without the dot.

The Method – How to Split a Website Across Multiple Servers

Go to your own server’s control panel (usually CPanel) and create an add on domain by entering the details for your top level domain. For our example domain, this would be created as example.com

Do not worry, creating an add on domain will not change the current set-up for your domain. Requests for your domain will still be directed to the server it already points at.

Next, create a sub domain for your newly created add on domain. Again, you should do this from your server control panel. Ensure the sub domain’s folder resides under the top level domain’s folder. Our example sub domain is subdomain.example.com It would sit on our server under the following directory structure (Linux)

public_html/domain/subdomain

To send requests for the sub domain, subdomain.example.com, to any server we specify we must create the following items for it

• Domain Name Server (DNS) records (A-NAME and CNAME), and
  
• A URL Redirect

They are very easy to set-up and should take less than 5 minutes although they could take several hours to fully propagate the web. Using our example sub domain, subdomain.example.com, to point it to our example server, Server 2, those records will look similar to these (the left hand side is the Host Name, the right hand side is the server detail):

A-NAME or A-ADDRESS

subdomain = 999.888.777.66

www.subdomain = 999.888.777.66

A-NAMEs point to the IP address of the target server

CNAME or Name Server (NS)

subdomain = ns123.server-two.com.

subdomain = ns124.server-two.com.

Create as many NS records as you have name servers.

CNAMEs point to the target server’s Name Server

URL Redirect

www.subdomain = http://subdomain.example.com

The URL redirection ensures that requests for www are sent to the http: version of the site

Here is an example picture of how your domain’s DNS records might look (click it to view the full sized image)

Example DNS Records

The new sub domain’s server details could take a few hours to fully propagate the Internet. Once its details have spread around, whenever someone requests your TLD they will be sent to one server and when they request your sub domain they will reach your secondary server.

You can create as many sub domains on as many servers as you require for your website. I often use this method to create sitemaps, directories and blogs when a free hosted site fails to provide them.

If you need to reroute your emails then you can usually create an email forwarding service from within your domain registrar’s control panel; but that’s another article altogether.

If you need your own host server then I highly recommend Hostgator. I’ve been with them for many years and cannot fault their servers, their services or their products. I register most of my domain names through them too.

Here is my Hostgator affiliate link

COUPON CODES: Hostgator’s current coupon codes are

• Use “freemonth” to get a free month of hosting if you plan to pay monthly,
• Use “snowman” to get 20% off a year’s hosting if you plan to pay per year.

Those codes are valid for both shared and reseller hosting plans. Dedicated server lease is on a per year basis so only the “snowman” coupon code can be used to get a massive %20 off the yearly fee.

When I can’t buy domain names from Hostgator I buy them from 123-reg.co.uk. Although Hostgator is my preferred option.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010

The Webmasters Network

A lonely fact of a webmasters life is the time spent locked away in solitude as we notch up backlinks to our websites. Some come organically through people visiting our sites and bookmarking us on a do-follow social networking site or by placing a link to us on one of their own websites such as a free Wordpress or Tumblr blog. Other links we create artificially by connecting with other webmasters and asking them to link to us in return for a link back to them or we add our sites into the many directories that are available to us. It takes a lot of time to build backlinks even when auto submitters are used.

A couple of days ago I learned about a directory project that is changing all that. It is called BungeeBones and offers 10,000 backlinks for the price of 1. Intrigued, I took a look, thought this sounds good – too good to be true; so I looked more deeply into it and contacted the project’s leader to find out more details. After several email exchanges, which I might write about in a later article, and a bit of research I concluded the project is genuine and will do as it heralds, namely, give thousands of backlinks for the free price of one.

BungeeBones is a directory with a difference – it is a remotely hosted human edited directory hub that allows webmasters to plug-in to it and display it on their own websites.  Any webmaster can submit URLs to the directory and can optionally place a version of the directory on a submitted  site. Each version of the directory is a stand alone product. Thousands of webmasters are already plugged in and connected through it so a link submitted to a directory on one site will potentially display in every other directory that is connected to the hub.  It is like using an automatic directory submitter: one click submits a link to thousands of directories.

If you are already inspired enough to use the BungeeBones directory to increase traffic to your website then please feel free to click here and move on to the Installation guide otherwise please read on if you need a little more conviction…

The hardest part of setting up any directory is getting people to submit to it. A directory is like a city – it is either living, breathing and bustling with activity or it is a ghost town with sand blowing in the wind, shutters banging and a few tombstones poking out of the ground. Most webmasters won’t submit to a dead directory that gives them the spooks. So the more links a directory has, the more alive it looks, the more likely a webmaster will submit to it and recommend it to their buddies.

The second hardest part of setting up a directory is convincing visitors to browse it. Again, visitors prefer directories that look busy and well used.

It is common knowledge that some webmasters make their directories look busy by pulling in links from other, better established, directories like DMOZ and Gimpsy. Such a tactic might give the impression of a thriving directory but it has one very big flaw: it gives away loads of valuable backlinks; and most of them are nonreciprocal. It creates a flood of traffic away from the directory with little to no traffic returned. Does that sound like a good deal to you?

The BungeeBones’ directory is already fully set-up, has thousands of users, is growing daily and is getting a lot of publicity. The iron does not get much hotter than this.

This is the first remotely hosted directory I have seen that apparently functions as a cloud network. It is a cross between a directory, an exclusive do-follow social bookmarking site, a search engine, an ad network and a traffic generator that provides serps benefits to webmasters. To submit a link to any one of the directories connected to the BungeeBones’ network is the same as to submit it to any other node of the directory. It is a one-to-many equation: one link submission equals many link submissions – a submission to one directory will potentially display at every other directory connected to the BungeeBones’ directory hub. It benefits all connected webmasters mutually.

Each directory set up within the network drives traffic to every other website plugged in to the network.

Each installed directory node has its own meta tags and webmasters have some control over the links displayed in their directory node. This reinforces the uniqueness of each directory to search engines.

You’re thinking, “Yeah, but, all the links and descriptions will look the same.” That is true, but ask yourself how many descriptions you use for your own sites when you submit them to multiple directories.

Most webmasters repeat the same anchor text and URL description in most of the directories they submit them. Search engines will arrive at each BungeeBones directory node, spider it, see a similar set of links, see different meta tags, see a different directory URL, will decide webmasters are too lazy to provide unique descriptions for their links then, after a cyber chuckle to itself, will index the directory as being different to every other. Consequently, each spidered link will count as a unique backlink.

There is no need to worry about spam. The directory is self-policing. Submitted URLs have to be approved by a human editor before they are added into the directory. After a URL has been approved for entry into the directory, webmasters and visitors can rate their value. The more valued the URL the more prominent its placement within the directory – in lay terms, higher votes, better placement. The system is hard to abuse due to IP monitoring and other, non-disclosed built in fail-safes.

So, what could make this directory better? It’s already set-up, it’s self-policing, provides traffic and backlinks; could it get any better?

Try this: participating webmasters earn commission from the sale of featured links and the sale of multiple category placements by the webmasters they refer to it. Plus participating webmasters get their links featured and inserted into multiple categories for %50 of the typical price. Remember the initial URL insertion into one category is free per domain so there is no cash outlay to join this expanding network.

To recap, the BungeeBones directory offers:

1. An easy to set up, fully functional directory
2. Pre-installed links which make the directory look busy and active
3. A directory that can be set up for each website a webmaster owns
4. A free to install, free to set up and free to submit to directory
5. A directory that can be uniquely styled to make it stand out
6. An easy to manage directory. It looks after itself – it is managed by BungeeBones so you can set it and forget it
7. Multiple category listings for any URL for a modest fee
8. Featured listings
9. Commission from upsells
10. Built-in anti spam system
11. Thousands of backlinks from the many websites that are already plugged into the directory
12. Targeted traffic
    

Installation

Installation is easy. It comes with one prerequisite: you must submit a URL to the directory before you can install it under that URLs domain.

There are two forms of the directory:

1. A standalone installation
2. A plugin for Wordpress and Joomla!

URL submission is simple. You can submit through any of the directories that are currently connected to the BungeeBones hub or you can add your submission through BungeeBones when you install a plugin into Wordpress or Joomla!

The directory can be installed into a folder under the top level domain (TLD) or in the root folder of the TLD of the submitted URL. You can install the directory as many times as you wish under as many names as you want under as many TLDs as you decide provided you install the correct code issued for the TLD you wish to install it at. For example:

If you go to my standalone directory at http://journalxtra/directory and submit your URL then you could install your directory on your own website at (assuming you submitted the URL http://example.com) either of

• example.com/directory.php, or
  
• example.com/subfolder/directory.php

The installation code for a directory is tied to the submitted domain to ensure accurate referral details and to maintain unique metatag information for the directory displayed at that domain.

To install the standalone directory

1. Submit your URL to any of the directory’s access nodes. This gives you access to your user control panel and enrolls you in the commission share program;
2. You will see your URL listed in the User Control Panel under the “User CP Home” tab. Next to your URL are the words “Add a Widget”. Click them.
3. The next screen provides both instructions for the installation and questions about the directory you wish to install. There are 7 questions and instructions in total, let’s go through their answers one-by-one:
   1. You have the choice to create an installation folder under your domain’s root folder. For example, your-domain.com/some-folder . If you create a folder for the installation then you should put the name of that folder as the answer to question number one. If you choose to install your directory at the root of your domain (e.g your-domain.com/directory.php) then you should answer “root” to question number one;
   2. Decide what you want to call the file that will hold your directory’s installation code. This file must be given a php file type (for example, directory.php). Whatever you name this file is the answer to question number two. Ensure there is no other file with the same name where you intend to create this one. Use your server control panel to create that file either at the root of your domain name or under the folder specified in answer to question number one (for example, create it at either http://example.com/directory.php or http://example.com/sub-folder/directory.php);
   3. Your directory will need a title so that it is easily recognized by human visitors and distinguished as unique by search engines. Think of a title and use it to answer question three. Whatever you put into here will form part of your directory’s metatag information. Do not use the name of your domain in this section or your metatags will display your domain name twice;
   4. Create another part to your directory’s title, a short slogan, and enter it in response to question four;
   5. Decide whether you want to display non-paying links or not. If you want your directory to be small and to only show paid submissions choose “no” in answer to question 5; otherwise choose “yes” and use question 6 to select whether non-paid (free) link submissions should be displayed indefinitely else for any period up to a year. It is this option that helps multiple directories to appear as unique entities to search engines due to the differences created among them by virtue of the links they display.
   6. Branding. Your directory can be branded as either BungeeBones or AdvertiPage. The differences between the two options are purely cosmetic from a human perspective and only affect the submit URL button and the landing page webmasters reach when they click it. Choose the brand that suits the impression you want to give fellow webmasters – AdvertiPage is more stylish.
4. Click “Submit Link Info” to be taken to a confirmation page. Check the setup details you entered on its previous page and click either back or next to cancel or confirm as appropriate.
5. The installation code. You have two options: use a predefined template or create your own template. The code should be pasted into the file specified during step 3 of the set up process. For example, if you created a file called directory.php then that is where the code should be pasted. The directory will not function correctly if the installation code is in the wrong place. The two code formats are:
   1. Code Format One which can be copied and pasted as is into your directory file, it will need only minor tweaks to style it;
   2. Code Format Two which is for more advanced webmasters and provides only a page header and the content creation script. This should be used by those who wish to create their own directory layout. Line 4 of part one of this code must have your affiliate ID entered into it. You can copy this from line 4 of Code Format One (displayed above it).
6. If needed, you can recreate your directory code if you make a mistake, want to move your directory to a new location or want to change the directory’s metatag titling.
7. Unless already present, remember to create a robot.txt file (can be left empty) and an .htaccess file (apache/linux servers). The .htaccess file should contain the line “DirectoryIndex name-of-directoy-file.php” (change “name-of-directoy-file.php” to the name of the file created in step 3.2 and do not include the quotes). Do not overwrite those files if they already exist.

To install the content management system widget

Wordpress

At the present time, the Wordpress plugin is still in beta and only works with the default permalinks structure. However that is no reason for you not to enjoy using this wonderful directory. You have at least four options to connect your own directory to your blog:

1. Use the plugin
2. Create a direct link to it in your blogroll
3. Put a link to it into a text widget
4. Create a page with a link to it inside of it

To use the plugin

The plugin is now at beta version 0.0.3 (although Wordpress still displays it as 0.0.1)  and now works with permalinks. It is under heavy development. I have spoken with the project’s leader, Robert Lefebure, on many occasions this past week and sincerely trust he will have the plugin out of beta soon – he has already made great strides toward that end. Here are the installation instructions:

1. Install it from here at Wordpress or locate it from your Dashboards Plugins tab by clicking Add New and typing BungeeBones into the search field.
2. Create a blog page called Directory (or anything else you like) and enter the following shorttag into it:
   
[bungeebones_directory]

   
3. Save the page and make a note of the page ID (it will look similar to this ?page_id=544). If you are using permalinks, you might need to disable them while you get the page ID (re-enable them after you have got your page ID). Disabling and re-enabling permalinks will not affect your blog’s functionality provided you re-enable the same permalink style.
   
4. Go to BungeeBones or one of its access nodes and submit your URL. Make a note of the URL number it displays after the submission process.
   
5. During the submission process you will be given the option either to create a Directory Widget or to just Add Your Link. If you wish to add your link at a later time then you can re-visit your Bungeebones Control Panel (User CP Home) and click the “Edit This Widget” link listed next to the URL you wish to place a directory at. The instructions for adding your directory either during the URL submission process or afterwards (at a later date) are the same as listed below.
6. The next screen provides both instructions for the installation and 7 questions about the directory you wish to install.The answers depend on where your blog is installed, let’s go through those answers one-by-one:
   1. The first question requires you to state where your Wordpress blog is installed. When you browse the homepage of your Wordpress blog, does your browser’s address bar show your domain name (e.g http://my-blog.com) or does it show your domain name and a folder name (e.g http://my-blog.com/superblog/ or http://my-blog.com/superblog/extra/). If your address bar only displays your domain name then your answer to question one is root if your address bar shows a folder or series of folders then your answer will be all those folder names inclusive of the forward slashes between them (e.g superblog/extra).
   2. The second question asks you for the name of your directory page. Enter the page ID you noted in step 3 above (e.g ?page_id=544).
   3. This question is split into two parts and is about meta tags. This question is optional but their completion will help distinguish your directory from other BungeeBones directories. In case you didn’t know, meta tags control information such as the title that is displayed within a web browser tab and the keywords that are displayed to search engine spiders. They do not affect the display of the page but can help to improve search engine placement.
      1. The description meta tag is often the description of a web page that is displayed by search engines when it is returned within search results. Enter the description you would like search engines to display to potential visitors when they see your site in their search results. A description should be less than 250 characters (approximately 50 words). BungeeBones automatically provides a description via dynamic meta tags. This description is complete and unique for each BungeeBones page but the same across all sites. If you want to make this description unique for your site, add a few words, say 10 (50 characters) that will inspire someone to click your link and not someone else’s link.
      2. Keywords are used by search engines to help determine the relevance of a website or web page to a search request. Search engines prefer to gather keywords from within a web page but placing them into a meta tag can help a search engine determine that your site is just what someone is looking for. Keep them relevant to your directory and separate each keyword or key phrase with a comma e.g “search directory,music search,find,”
   4. Decide whether you want to display non-paying links or not and if so for how long you want to display them.
   5. Your directory can be branded as either BungeeBones or AdvertiPage. The differences between the two options are purely cosmetic from a human perspective and only affect the submit URL button and the landing page webmasters reach when they click it. Choose the brand that suits the impression you want to give fellow webmasters – AdvertiPage is more stylish.
7. Click “Submit Link Info” to be taken to a confirmation page. Check the setup details you entered on its previous page and click either “Go Back” (to change them) or “Continue and Finish” (to confirm them).
   
8. All being well, when you submit the form you will be taken to a new page that shows some code. You need to get your affiliate number from it. Don’t worry, it’s easy to find. Look at Code Format One and find the 4th line down that looks similar to
   
$affiliate_num = 2584;

   The number at the end is your personal affiliate number. Make a note of it.
9. Return to your Wordpress Dashboard and click the “Editor” tab under “Plugins”. At the top right hand side of the plugin editor you will see a drop down menu, select the plugin called “BungeeBones Remotely Hosted Web Directory” and edit the file “bungeebones_config.php”. There might be two of them so edit both. They are listed toward the bottom of the file list on the right hand side of the page. One of them is as described below (it is usually the second bungeebones_config.php).
   1. Near the top of the file is a line that reads
      
$affiliate_num = ????;

      It’s the forth line of text from the top. Change the question marks (here highlighted in red) with the affiliate number noted in step 8.
   2. If your Wordpress blog is installed in a subdirectory of your root domain (e.g http://example.com/myblog as opposed to just http://example.com) then you will need to edit the eighth text line from the top that looks like this
      
$offset = -1;

      Raise the offset number by 1 for every folder listed in your blog’s URL address after the root domain name when you view your blog’s homepage in your browser’s address bar. For example, if when you view your blog your browser’s address bar reads http://example.com/my-blog then the offset number is raised by 1 from minus 1 to 0, like this
      
$offset = 0;

      Likewise, if your address bar reads http://example.com/folder/my-blog then the offset number will be raised by 2 from minus 1 to 1
      
$offset = 1;

   3. Are you using permalinks? If you are you will need to edit the eleventh text line down that read
      
$bb_permalink_name = "bungeebones-distributed-web-directory";

      Swap “bungeebones-distributed-web-directory” for the name of your directory page (e.g links-directory) so that it looks similar to this
      
$bb_permalink_name = "links-directory";

   4. If you wish to set up dynamic meta tags you will need to perform some minor surgery to your theme’s header.php file. The instructions for this are listed in bungeebones_config.php. I know they work on some blogs but getting it to work with some themes can be tricky. I’ll add these instructions here as soon as I am more familiar with setting them up
   5. Save the file and test your new Directory page. Some themes require new pages to be activated before they become visible in their menubar

To create a regular blogroll type link

Firstly, install create a standalone directory as described above. Then go to your Wordpress Dashboard and look down the left hand side of the page. Near the top is the “Links” tab, click Create a Link Category, create a category called Remote Directory then click Add New and enter the URL of your standalone directory and assign it to the newly created Remote Directory category. This will place a link to your directory on every page that displays your blog links. Some themes might need the link to be enabled before it becomes visible.

I won’t provide instructions for adding a link into either a blank page or a text widget because doing so is fairly straight forward once a standalone directory has been created.

Joomla!

The Joomla! directory component has been available for much longer than the one for Wordpress hence it is a much more mature and more popularly used product. I’ve not yet tried it. I promise I will create a test installation of Joomla! this week to try it and write up the installation instructions. In the meantime the Directory component and full installation instructions are available here at BungeeBones.

I will update this BungeeBones direcotory installation guide whenever merited by the script’s and plugins’ development.

Those Web Links Again

Submit a URL to BungeeBones

View my BungeeBones’ standalone directory

Download the BungeeBones‘ Wordpress Widget (please sign up through my URL to make me look good )

Download the Joomla! plugin, again please make me look good by signing up through my URL.

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