Sitemap, URL slugs and links

contractor-chron

Hello, I am having difficulty figuring out how to create links and connect them to separate pages in my site. I have a domain that I connected within gitlabs, but I am trying to make more than just a homepage. How would one connect individual pages made in Silex to urls with the domain name with a slug?

contractor-chron

Sorry I just tested the page title name and it links to the individual page. Apologies for the post. I guess the other question would be how to create a site map to link to google search console for indexing?

lexoyo

hey that's fun, I had a question about links this morning by email, and I made this page more complete with info about links and anchors: pages and links. What do you think?

And concerning the sitemap, i have been working on this but for now it is not automatic, there are manual steps. Please vote for the feature request "Automatically generate sitemap.xml after site publish"

If you want I can give you instructions so you can add the sitemap to your site today, or you prefer to wait for this feature to be implemented? It should be 1 line of code to paste in the .gitlab-ci.yml file of your gitlab project, do you see where this is?

contractor-chron

Apologies yes the email was from me. I am just trying to quickly create a lead gen site didn't mean to message in so many places.

Totally fine to wait for sitemap implementation. My site is so small for now it looks like I can just submit a text file with the url links to google search console for the time being.

I would be curious what the code would be to insert if it is an easy addition. I did find the gitlab file.

lexoyo

Here is the file content

# silexOverwrite: true
# You will want to remove these lines if you customize your build process
# Silex will overwrite this file unless you remove these lines
# This is the default build process for plain eleventy sites
image: node:20
pages:
  stage: deploy
  environment: production
  script:
    - npx @11ty/eleventy@v3.0.0-alpha.20 --input=public --output=_site
    - mkdir -p public/css public/assets && cp -R public/css public/assets _site/
    - rm -rf public && mv _site public
    - echo "The site will be deployed to $CI_PAGES_URL"
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
  rules:
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_TAG'
    - if: '$CI_PIPELINE_SOURCE == "trigger"'

you need to change # silexOverwrite: true to # silexOverwrite: false so that it will not be reset automatically by silex at next publication
edit the file in gitlab: click the button "edit in place" like in this screenshot:
add this line - npx @silexlabs/sitemapgen -s _site -o _site -u $CI_PAGES_URL at line 12 like so:
back to silex, click "publish" again

there should be a /sitemap.xml after the build is complete

contractor-chron

I finally got the file edit to output the sitemap. I needed to install eleventy plugin from the docs along with the "- npm i" as the first line underneath "script", though maybe I should go ahead and delete that line. Then after publishing the site and the pipeline working, then it permitted the addition of the sitemap line.

The only caveat is sitemap output is a paragraph of the site's different urls with the gitlab domain. Would be interesting eventually to have a sitemap that lists the urls and autogenerates with the "last date modified" to help google search console when crawling (though it's easy to ask for things than to make it myself, just not a coder yet). Otherwise I am happy I got the output to work.

lexoyo

contractor-chron

Well done!!
Would that doc have helped ? https://docs.silex.me/en/user/cms-plugins#h-11ty-plugins

contractor-chron

Yes that doc helped me get the eleventy plugin working.

I was trying yesterday a couple online tutorials about creating a more organized sitemap but admittedly I could get none of them to work. Potentially the issue is that none of my pages carry the collection notation that eleventy uses to process a sitemap? Here's one I tried but can't understand why it's not processing, maybe if you are able to better interpret with your experience:
https://11ty.recipes/recipes/add-a-sitemap/

One thing I'm seeing that may be I think relevant to this. It looks like when I use hyperlinks to different pages (the "Page" option rather than the url version) in different parts of the site, it tends to go to the version of the url with the ".html" at the end and leads to a 404 error when the hyperlink is clicked. When I edit the clicked on url in the browser to exclude the ".html", the page is functioning. Probably cleaner to have one of them a functioning version rather than both urls (one without the ".html" and one with), but I accidentally uploaded for indexing a bunch of pages with the ".html" to my google search console. Maybe will need to do some research on how to redirect or try to remove the .html versions of the urls from being indexed.

contractor-chron

Well...now it looks like the html versions are working again, I just reset to "true" silexOverwrite as it looks like the pipeline is getting stalled somewhere for something, possibly after trying too many times alternative eleventy sitemaps..

lexoyo

I just reset to "true" silexOverwrite

this means that next time you publish in silex, it will overwrite the pipeline file with a default one

but that's a good thing, we should go over the whole process again right?

would you follow these steps again? https://community.silex.me/d/138-sitemap-url-slugs-and-links/6
paste the resulting pipeline file here?
maybe give me access to your repo, i'll check it out

contractor-chron

Thanks I read the write-up for putting together a sitemap and it works, definitely. However (and admittedly if I could maybe code something here, but I am still an amateur, so I will just mention here some thoughts..), the key drawback is the gitlab domain name in place of the custom domain in the sitemap wouldn't be helpful to google search console at least for indexing. I was able to generate a sitemap with the domain name using this took called https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. So I pasted that into an xml file that I made on gitlab. However it looks like when silex publishes, it overwrites files added manually into gitlab. I remember you had the line that you can edit silexOverwrite:false, however, when I remove the # mark (to make it not a comment?) gitlab throws an error.

Anyways, since my website is very small I can just do things manually just submitting urls one by one, it's no issue in the end. Technically my website is functioning and I've found some clients so I appreciate the free option here

lexoyo

Hello, thank you for the feedback
It is not normal that the domain name is wrong in the generated sitemap, i can help you debug it if you want? Maybe you can share the site with me on gitlab (lexoyo)

lexoyo

or maybe paste the .gitlab-ci.yml here