[Sigia-l] Site map generator?

[Lyle Kantrovich]

On 11/30/05, Listera <listera at rcn.com> wrote:
> Because discovering links and parsing out relationships among them and
> finally clustering such relationships at various levels of granularity to
> unearth interaction flows is something tools can do better than humans. We
> have had over a decade of such tools and not just for websites, but all for
> sorts of info visualization, data mining, gene sequencing, statistics, log
> analysis, etc.

Sometimes logical theories don't work out in the real world...or the
online world in this case.  :-)

I've tried many a "site mapper" in my day, and found a few that could
work for very small sites...but nothing that scaled well.

There's a few issues to building this kind of "simple" tool:
1. Directory and file structure doesn't always map to the semantic or
content structure
2. There are many different kinds of "site maps":
  - hyperbolic style vs. hierarchical or "org chart" style
  - interactive / zoomable vs.printable and readable
  - maps that convey macro structure vs. maps that convey micro
structure (e.g. page details like what components are on a page)
3. What level of detail do you want?  A node for each page (e.g. for a
content audit), or just one node for each page type?  Tools can't
infer page types from directories and file names.

If anyone thinks this kind of tool would be easy to build, I'd suggest
they give it a try.

I recall using Xenu, Linkbot (r.i.p), Incontext (?...also r.i.p.) and
also watching Visio fail miserably at it's "wizard" attempt for at
least two version of that product.  I'm still usually creating them
node by node in Visio...but have done some smaller ones in a mind
mapping tool (www.mindjet.com) That's the best answer I've found until
someone builds a better tool.

Michael Angeles created a tool to draw maps from a text file, but it
didn't help me much: http://urlgreyhot.com/graphviz/
--
Lyle

--------------------------
Lyle Kantrovich
Blog: Croc O' Lyle
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com