About the Site Map
The site map is updated automatically, once a day. It is generated by looking
at an outline of the main areas of the Web site, and then following the links
in each file.
While the topmost levels of the map were generated by a human being, the lower
levels were not. As a result, you may sometimes see pages nested in odd ways,
or you may find that categories appear in places you might not expect them to
be.
Where the Names of Links Come From
When the site map contains a link which was automatically generated, the name
is taken from the document's title. If an entry in the site map has a name you
wouldn't expect, like "Untitled Document" or "index.htm,"
this is because the page was not titled properly.
The page's title is contained in the <HEAD> segment of the
HTML file, between <TITLE> and </TITLE>
tags. If you use a graphical HTML editor, it will have some way of editing the
titles of your pages.
Redefining the Map's Priorities
Including pages in a specific order
There are two ways that someone providing information on the College's site
can alter the way the site map generates links.
One is by giving it a hint as to the structure of your pages. You do this by
way of a sitemap.menu file. This is simply a normal HTML document
which appears in a folder that is already part of the site map. See the page
describing menus for more information on the structure of menu files.
For instance, if you have permission to create documents in the /lits/network
folder, you might create a sitemap.menu which outlines all of the
documents there and in all sub-folders. Then, when the site map is next generated,
late that night, your pages will be added in the same format as the sitemap.menu
file itself. If pages were found that you did not include in your sitemap.menu,
they are automatically added to the master site map.
Be aware that once you have created a sitemap.menu file, you have
to update the links in it whenever you change anything on your site. Otherwise,
you may start to get automatic error messages by email telling you that some
links are incorrect.
Excluding pages
It is also possible to prevent the site map from automatically adding pages.
This is done by creating a special file called sitemap.no in the
directory (or a parent directory) of the one containing the files. This is a
text file which lists the names of files or folders that are to be excluded.
It does not prevent files from being specifically added by way of a sitemap.menu
file.
For example, let's say you had the following files:
myfolder/
file1.html
file2.html
index.html
folder2/
file3.html
file4.html
and you wanted to prevent file1.html, file2.html,
and everything in folder2 from being added to the map. You could
then create a sitemap.no file with the contents:
file1.html
file2.html
folder2
You can also use Unix-style wildcards. So the same thing could also be accomplished
by using:
file[12].html
folder2/file[34].html
Another special word that can be used is .nofolders, which prevents
all folders from being added to the map.
It is important to remember that sitemap.no files can prevent
links in entire ranges of sub-folders from being indexed. Currently, both the
/courses folders and some of the folders in /org are
not automatically mapped, because they lead to too many entries in the site
map.
| 
