Show HN: Generate Visual Sitemap from sitemap.xml, just write URL | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Generate Visual Sitemap from sitemap.xml, just write URL

octopus.do

64 pointslosteden131 comments

I tried it on my company's website, surroundtech.com. It just produced a parent node and a very wide tree of child pages. Not useful in any way.

The website is built using a CMS that's part of our product line, which auto-generates a sitemap.xml file. It also automatically produces a Sitemap page: https://surroundtech.com/sitemap. The two tabs of interest are "Cards", which shows how each page would look when shared via social media links, and "Sitemap Tree" which shows the (non-graphical) page tree.

To be fair to the visual tool, our auto-generated xml is just a flat list of urls, and our auto-generated url routing is a flat list of uniquely named pages rather than a /-separated hierarchy. To create our own sitemap page we use the hierarchy that's built into our CMS, which also creates the top-level menu on the site.

Doug here's a 50-page demo of your site fully mapped w/ high-res screenshots: https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/0ab02eb852f0f5267291ce5...

*one thing we noticed is that your site does have an https certificate! I'd deeply consider fixing that since it will harm your google rankings[1].

[1]https://neilpatel.com/blog/does-a-ssl-certificate-affect-you...

Your supporting link directly contradicts your claim.

> He found that HTTPS is moderately correlated with higher search rankings on the search engine giant’s first page.

Google says it themselves : "https as a ranking signal" https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-s...

Yes, it's a positive ranking signal. They're definitely not penalizing sites for having certificates.

Seems likely it's a typo and he accidentally omitted the word "not"

It was just a typo, he accidentally omitted "not"

Neat design! I made related a tool that crawls a given URL and generates a 3D sitemap (essentially a directed graph): https://github.com/schedutron/visualnet

Doesn't work at all on my custom-generated sitemap.xml which is valid and accepted by search engines. Worse than that, it displays a bogus diagram rather than an error.

Without support for Sitemap-Index and pretty standard Wordpress Sitemaps this tool is little bit .... "tried it, doesn't work"

I've just tried on the YOAST generated sitemaps for Wordpress and.... it works.

But it just shows you a nested tree based on url depth using / as a delimiter - what it doesn't do is traverse the site or anything.

Still, it's quite pretty tho. I guess if you had a really deep url structure on your site, it would help you visualise it somewhat.

can you show an example? i just see the first level of the sitemapindex on YOAST sitemaps?

if you go to your-site.com/sitemap.xml in your browser, and then pick one of the further urls presented, and use that - it seems to work.

I like this idea a lot.

As sibling comments point out, there are kinks to work out in mapping out different website structures, and I would add the suggestion that greater information density could improve the UX.

But just think about the collective thousands of hours spent looking for things on websites. Helping a fraction of us find things a bit faster would add up to a big impact.

How does this work? I pressed the Create Sitemap button and it brought me to an unrelated page. Where's the input field to put my URL in?

“Create sitemap” button is Create Visual Sitemap from the very beginning.

Tried on a site URL; error Sitemap.xml file is absent or have errors.

I thought this service would explore links and draw site map for me..

for that level of magic.. just use https://VisualSitemaps.com ;-) and yes, we also crawl password-protected sites, great for user-dashboards and staging.

hey there, i tested your service last year, does what is says greatly. Price point is not there for me sadly

“Please note, that we don't crawl website content and structure, we use only the public sitemap.xml file.”

I've used visualsitemaps.com and really like it, seems to be way further along than this

thanks! And the best is coming in the next few weeks. Ping us: hello at visualsitemaps.com if you want to try our upcoming Screenshot Annotations() and Sitemap Editing().

Does anyone know if the graphing is done with a specific library or tool?

Looks hand-built with HTML. For simple trees that's often sufficient and means you can delegate layout to the browser instead of having to do it yourself.

I found this helpful when I was integrating visual sitemaps with documentation. They have a few different examples for different styles some don't even require JavaScript.

https://www.cssscript.com/clean-tree-diagram/

Import XML sitemap feature is one of many functions, but not major. Octopus.do is UX prototyping tool for creating Visual Sitemap from the very beginning.

it seems it doesn't support <sitemapindex>

Yeah I just tried our sitemap and all it detected was sub pages for each of our second-level sitemaps. Unfortunately it wasn't obvious what was supposed to happen so it took me a few minutes of poking about and then watching their sales video to guess what it should have done and why it was wrong.

When I tried with one of our leaf sitemaps that is nearing the 50k item limit it just errored. Given that all of the URLs are of the form `/item/<id>`, I'd expect it to be able to understand that there's only really one page type that they need to represent for that in their visual sitemap.

A couple observations:

1. The design looks similar to Hey.com

2. The domain name/name is like Octopus Deploy.

Benefit?

First Octopus is made to create visual sitemaps from the scratch. XML Generator helps rework and improve existing structure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com