I was a little slow to really pick up how cool Google Desktop Search actually is. Even with it installed I really didn't get to utilize it 100%. Among the things I couldn't get it to do, was search through content on network shares. And it seemed that the only way to accomplish Googeling those would be to run an instance of Google Desktop Search on the file server. In my case that is impossible, since Google Desktop Search is only available for Windows and the file server in question is running Linux. On top of that my choice of e-mail software isn't supported out of the box by Google Desktop Search. (I am a long time fan of Eudora for mail handeling on Windows boxes).

Well, as many of you probably have discovered already. There is a whole bunch of Plug-ins for Google Desktop Search.

To fix the problem with network shares, you just need to install a sweet little plug-in called TweakGDS - it will let you choose any mapped folder. (Read about how to map network folders if you don't know already).

The fix for the e-mail problem wasn't so easy to find. (That is, its not on the VERY short list of E-mail plug-ins for GDS).

But there is actually a GDS plug-in for Eudora available. Its called "Eudora Crawler" and seems to be doing the job.

If you are running Google Desktop Search and can't get it to index your Netscape Mail / Thunderbird then you really should update. GDS is out of beta with a whole lot of new formats supported...

Google Sitemaps is a new project from Google that aims to allow content creators to update the Google bots with information about site structure and update frequencies, among others.

Google has made available a tool called Sitemap generator. Its written in Python to generate sitemaps from server logs, url lists and when run on your server it can also make lists based on server directories.

There has been circulating a few different templates for Movable Type almost since Google Sitemaps was announced. Many of them has suffered from the rush of getting them published as soon as possible.

If you are running a blog based on Movable Type, the template from Anders should be the one you choose: Google SiteMaps for Movable Type - now with correct Last Modified dates (Anders Jacobsen's blog)

Not only has he fixed some bugs from the first templates published. He has also made sure you can distigunish between the new, fairly new and archive material so that you can set priority to max for new url's while lowering priority of scanning for archived material (which probably hasn't been updated since you wrote it - in any case).