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 Basics

PHP has the following functions is_array(), is_bool(), is_integer(), is_object(), is_string(), and many more.

Ruby also provides this functionality. Remember from the first lesson, Ruby is an object-oriented language so data type checking will be done with the method is_a?. Here are some examples:

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# PHP
if(is_string($var))
...

if(is_integer($var))
...

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# Ruby
if var.is_a? String
...
end

if var.is_a? Integer
...
end

PHP is very powerful when working with arrays. A few useful functions are array_keys(), array_values(), explode() and implode().

For Ruby, in the same order, the methods are keys, values, split and join.

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# PHP
$var = array( 'my',=>1, 'php'=>2, 'hash'=>3 );

$keys = array_keys($var); # using array_keys()
$values = array_values($var); # using array_values()

$new_array = explode(' ','my php array'); # using explode()
$new_string = implode(' ', $new_array); # using implode()

And for Ruby:

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# Ruby
var = { 'my'=>1, 'ruby' =>2, 'hash'=>3 }

keys = var.keys # using keys method
values = var.values

new_array = 'my ruby array'.split(' ') # using split method
new_string = new_array.join(' ')

# splitting a string option 2
new_array = %W(my ruby array)

Hope this was helpful.

The very basics

The Basics

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# PHP
$array = array('my', 'php', 'array');
$hash = array(
   'my_index'=>'my_value',
   'my_second_index'=>'my_second_value'
);

Ruby handles arrays and hashes separately.

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# Ruby
array = ['my','ruby','array']
hash = {
   'my_index'=>'my_value',
   'my_second_index'=>'my_second_value'
}