Automating XML Sitemap Creation with ChatGPT

To ensure my blog appears in Google searches, it's necessary to register an XML sitemap. However, manually updating this file every time I update a post is a hassle... So, I had ChatGPT write a script to automatically update the XML sitemap for me.

What You Will Learn in This Article

You will learn the following:

Overview of XML sitemaps
How to have ChatGPT write a Python script (as an example)
Code for automatic XML sitemap generation

What is the XML Sitemap

Here is an overview:

Data associated with an individual website.
- It’s website-wide, not page-specific.
A file that describes the information on the pages of a website in a format that search engines can read.
- Format = XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
Contains information about all the pages on the website, including URLs, update frequency, and importance.
- However, not all information is strictly required.
Using this improves the website's SEO, allowing users to find information on the website more quickly.

XML sitemaps are typically named something like sitemap.xml.

How Was the Code Written?: ChatGPT

The Python code for automatic XML sitemap generation was written by ChatGPT.
Here is the conversation with ChatGPT during that process.

Asking for an example format of an XML sitemap.
Requesting the code creation:
- Asking, "Please write code in Python that does the following: ..."
Requesting fine-tuning:
- Asking to format the last modification date as "yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS+09:00".
- Including index.html in the sitemap.

Notably, even when I accidentally sent an incomplete instruction, ChatGPT was able to understand the intent — this was quite surprising!

the Final Code Looks Like

Here is the final code provided by ChatGPT. By changing the part of the code where it says https://example.com, it can be used by almost anyone. It worked perfectly for my needs.

import glob
import os
import urllib.parse
from datetime import datetime

def get_last_modified_time(file_path):
    """
    Get the last modified time of a file.
    """
    modified_time = os.path.getmtime(file_path)
    return datetime.utcfromtimestamp(modified_time)

def generate_sitemap():
    """
    Generate sitemap.xml based on the files in the 'posts' directory.
    """
    # Get the last modified date of index.html
    index_last_modified = get_last_modified_time('index.html')

    files = glob.glob('posts/*.html')
    
    urls = []
    for file_path in files:
        file_name = os.path.basename(file_path)
        last_modified = get_last_modified_time(file_path)
        encoded_file_name = urllib.parse.quote(file_name)
        urls.append((encoded_file_name, last_modified))

    sitemap_content = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n'
    sitemap_content += '<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">\n'
    
    # Add index.html to the sitemap
    index_last_modified_str = index_last_modified.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+09:00')
    sitemap_content += f'   <url>\n'
    sitemap_content += f'      <loc>https://example.com/index.html</loc>\n'
    sitemap_content += f'      <lastmod>{index_last_modified_str}</lastmod>\n'
    sitemap_content += f'   </url>\n'
    
    for file_name, last_modified in urls:
        last_modified_str = last_modified.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+09:00')
        sitemap_content += f'   <url>\n'
        sitemap_content += f'      <loc>https://example.com/{file_name}</loc>\n'
        sitemap_content += f'      <lastmod>{last_modified_str}</lastmod>\n'
        sitemap_content += f'   </url>\n'
    
    sitemap_content += '</urlset>'
    
    with open('sitemap.xml', 'w') as sitemap_file:
        sitemap_file.write(sitemap_content)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    generate_sitemap()

Bonus

If you save the above code as generate_sitemap.py in a programs folder, you can create a batch file in the same directory as the programs folder to run the script just by double-clicking the batch file.

python ./programs/generate_sitemap.py

Summary

In this article, we covered the following:

Overview of XML sitemaps
How to have ChatGPT write a Python script (as an example)
Code for automatic XML sitemap generation

I was particularly surprised when ChatGPT understood my intention even when I accidentally sent an incomplete instruction...!
I hope this will be helpful for those looking to automate tasks or use ChatGPT in similar ways.

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