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WriteMaps Blog

Thanks, WriteMaps Community!June 1

Since its launch just over a year ago, WriteMaps has had the great fortune of being reviewed and supported by a slew of great websites. In fact, the word-of-mouth (err text..) has been so powerful that WriteMaps now has nearly 13,000 registered users without ever using paid advertising! I'm extremely humbled by the support of the WriteMaps community and am constantly amazed as more and more users are showing up every day. I'd like to extend a huge thanks to everyone who is out there spreading the word for this application - it means a lot! Interested in Supporting WriteMaps? WriteMaps is completely free to use and although we just might add a more feature-rich paid plan in the future (*hint hint*), the features that are free now will always be free. If you enjoy using WriteMaps and would like to show your support, we would greatly appreciate your help. Here are a few ways to show your support that we'd gratefully offer to you. Blog Badges If you'd like to show your support by placing a WriteMaps badge on your website or blog, we've designed a few for you to choose from: Donating to WriteMaps Donations greatly help cover the cost of hosting and developing WriteMaps, and every little bit helps. If you are interested in donating to WriteMaps, please use our Paypal donation form and we'll be sure to thank you personally. Sponsoring WriteMaps If you would like to make a donation in return for recognition on the WriteMaps site, we just might be able to work s

New Print Preview ToolApril 29

Printing on WriteMaps has always been more difficult than I'd like it to be. Some browsers helpfully tile a large sitemap across several printed pages while others simply print a crop of the top left portion of the map. Since the majority of browsers seem to do the latter, I've received numerous messages requesting better print control and I've been working hard at figuring out a good solution. Tonight I added a new print preview feature to the application to give users more control over their print output. You can get to this preview screen by selecting "Print" in the WriteMaps toolbar File menu, as shown: Clicking print will bring you to the new print preview interface. A dotted red box represents your paper size and you can adjust its dimensions using the text inputs at the top of the page. This will give you a good idea of how much of your sitemap will fit on your printed page. This tool becomes particularly useful for printing large sitemaps, because you can drag and zoom your sitemap around to bring different sections of your sitemap into the printable area. This allows you to make printed tiles of your map which can be pieced together after printing. Here's what the print preview looks like: I hope this helps everyone out! Feel free to leave a comment and let me know how you like it. Also, as always, if you notice any buggy behavior, please use the feedback form to report it so it can be taken care of right away. Thanks! Developer Footnote Many of the features

Google dropping OAI-PMH protocol in favor of XML standardApril 25

Google's Webmaster Central Blog posted this morning that it is dropping support for the OAI-PMH sitemap protocol in favor of the XML standard. This is good news for WriteMaps users who have been using our application's export feature for their XML sitemaps. WriteMaps uses the standard XML sitemap schema specified at Sitemaps.org for its XML export. Looks like the standard has caught on and is here to stay! Link: Retiring support for OAI-PMH in Sitemaps

New Feature: Page Sorting!April 8

Ever since WriteMaps launched, I've received several emails per week requesting the ability to sort pages. Many a glowing review has been tainted with this caveat, but despite my best efforts, it just wasn't going to come easy. Well Finally, tonight (or this morning I should say...) I'm happy to announce that you can now sort your pages to your heart's content. Simply click on a page in your sitemap and drag it around. As you drag your page over the rest of the map, highlighted 'drop zones' will appear as guides to let you know where it is safe to drop. You can sort pages that have child pages as well. And like the other editing features in WriteMaps, sorting is tracked in your undo menu so you can always revert back to where you were. I'm very excited to finally have this feature up and running so please give it a spin and let me know what you think! And as usual, if you run into any problems or obscure bugs, please use the feedback form so we can get in touch with you and resolve the issue quickly. Thanks and enjoy!

New Host!April 3

Yesterday was moving day. The time had come to move WriteMaps to a better, faster, and more reliable server environment. Despite prolonged down time, the move went very well. I'm happy to announce that WriteMaps has settled into its new home quite nicely, with noticeable speed improvements when browsing from page to page. I want to thank all the WriteMaps members for their patience during the move yesterday. I always aim to keep downtime to a minimum and it appears that this move will help with that moving forward. The new hosting environment also opens up some new technical opportunities which were unavailable on the previous setup, and I expect this to result in some cool new features and speed improvements in the very new future! Thanks again and enjoy!