
Show HN: Generate Visual Sitemap from sitemap.xml, just write URL - losteden1
https://octopus.do/sitemap/resource/generator
======
DougWebb
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](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.

~~~
artur_makly
Doug here's a 50-page demo of your site fully mapped w/ high-res screenshots:
[https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/0ab02eb852f0f5267291ce5...](https://app.visualsitemaps.com/share/0ab02eb852f0f5267291ce5b53118fef)

*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...](https://neilpatel.com/blog/does-a-ssl-certificate-affect-your-seo-a-
data-driven-answer/)

~~~
recursive
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.

~~~
artur_makly
Google says it themselves : "https as a ranking signal"
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-
ranking-s...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-
signal.html)

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

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

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schedutron
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](https://github.com/schedutron/visualnet)

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seanhunter
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.

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

~~~
Jaruzel
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.

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

~~~
Jaruzel
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.

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divbzero
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.

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bzb3
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?

~~~
losteden1
“Create sitemap” button is Create Visual Sitemap from the very beginning.

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lucasverra
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..

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

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

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virgil_disgr4ce
I've used visualsitemaps.com and really like it, seems to be way further along
than this

~~~
artur_makly
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().

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

~~~
ygra
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.

~~~
benologist
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/](https://www.cssscript.com/clean-tree-diagram/)

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losteden1
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.

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_ZeD_
it seems it doesn't support <sitemapindex>

~~~
danpalmer
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.

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broth
A couple observations:

1\. The design looks similar to Hey.com

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

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thescribbblr
Benefit?

~~~
losteden1
First Octopus is made to create visual sitemaps from the scratch. XML
Generator helps rework and improve existing structure

