Six Studios

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask decided on a sitemap.xml file/schema a while back.

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling.

Google – Webmaster Tools

When a website is re-indexed this sitemap.xml file is scanned for added and updated pages. For faster indexing, search engines can also be notified, or pinged, when content has been added to your website.

A plugin was made for the Mephisto Blog to generate the sitemap.xml file. That plugin can be found here.

I made a fork the mephisto_sitemap plugin and added code to ping Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask everytime a post has been added/updated. You can find it on my Github Repository.

The Six Studios blog launched initially with Wordpress and has since moved to Mephisto. Both are excellent products, but appeal to two very different audiences.

Wordpress out of the box

Its PHP. Its easy to install and even easier to use. That’s why it was my first pick.

The text editor is very friendly (TinyMCE) and so is the interface. The text editor gives the user a presentation view of the content.

An HTML view of the post is available too. The presentation view allows the user to see what text is bold, underlined, and italicized, but wont indicate what content a search engine will deem most important. Though WYSIWYG editors are the easiest editors to use, presentation without proper tagging only solves half the problem. The code is left for the search engine to decide what is most relevant instead of tagging it as such.

Mephisto out of the box

Its Rails. You’re required to know how a Rails application works in order to set it up. This isn’t significant for a developer or a tech savvy person with Google at his/her finger tips, but for the average person that wants a blog it might be to much to ask.

Mephisto’s text editor allows the user to format each post with Textile, Markdown, Markdown with Smarty Pants and plain HTML. This gives the user much more control upfront, but requires knowledge of the markup syntax and proper tagging. Though more work is needed, utilizing proper tags such as header (h1-h6) tags will yield a better results in search engines.

Coderay for syntax highlighting and Akismet SPAM blocking are also built into Mephisto.

Thoughts

Out of the box Wordpress is meant to answer the needs of most. Get up and get posting. Mephisto answering the needs of a developer and the code-conscious. Syntax highlighting and proper code formatting.

Two very different targets. Two excellent products.