active.com is an aggregator of data from disparate sites within the Active Network.  Because the source of content is distributed and because we have so much of it, creating a sitemap.xml file for SEO purposes has become challenging.  We're working on a new search solution (which you can access in Beta at http://labs.active.com/search) , and the engine behind that has a sitemap.xml generating capability.

But there's only one problem: the file it generates is huge.

According to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html, a sitemap file can only be 10MB in size or up to 30,000 URLs (whichever comes first). The sitemap for active.com has over 220,000 URLs and is about 34MB in size.

We needed an application that would split the sitemap.xml file, according to the constraints above.  I searched all over the internet for something that would do this, and was found only with commercial applications that wanted to crawl my site before generating/splitting the sitemap.xml files.

So, my team developed a simple, .NET-based application that splits a large sitemap.xml file into smaller ones, and also creates the sitemap index file which references them.

Because I'm feeling philanthropic, I decided to give you access to this tool, free of charge.  Download it here.

We've just released our newest project to labs.active.com, Active Classifieds.  Have you ever wanted to assemble a group of people to block wind for you on a weekend ride or sell an old baseball glove? 

Active Classifieds is a simple app designed to make it easy for you to sell your old sports stuff or meetup with like-minded people. 

Dive in and let us know what you think.

Based on what our analytics tools tell us, many of you go straight to what we call our "event details" pages on active.com.  These pages are designed to showcase information about, say, a 10k, to help you decide if you want to register or not (check out the event details page for the Niantic Bay 10K, for example).

We think there's a lot that can be improved about this page.  Namely A) it's design, B) the speed at which it loads, and C) its lack of focus on, well, you.  So we're starting into a sequence of updates that will spice things up bit.  Here's a preview of what's coming in the first update.

It's got a completely re-vamped look and feel.  We've also modified the reviews system, making it so people who review an event also rate it on a scale of 1 - 5 (using our fancy stars). 

Future releases will include Youtube and Flickr integration as well as a host of other goodies.  But look for this update in the next month or so!

We now have over 100 users in our Search Beta, and the feedback we've received so far has been positive. One user has asked:

"I would love to see something interactive where I could quickly access different multimedia from past events. It wouldn't necessarily be official race photos (I'd actually prefer that they weren't) but even links to a search results page for the event's name in Flickr or YouTube would be great. Even a search OUTSIDE the active network, bringing me to different bloggers who have posted about the events or written race reports from past events would be great to see."

I couldn't agree more.  There's a ton of interesting, relevant content out there in the cloud that would add value to search.  We're working now to implement this feature, pulling in photos from flickr, videos from youtube, tweets from twitter and blog posts from technorati (a blog search engine).

Sign up for access to our Search Beta at http://labs.active.com/users/new using the invite code "blogsearchinvite".

update: we've just rolled out integration to Twitter, Flickr and Youtube!

For some time now, Jumpcut has been Active's video provider.  As some of you may be aware, Yahoo has decided to shelve Jumpcut and they are no longer accepting video uploads.  The decision to halt uploads came as a surprise to us; we were notified only a week prior.  Since our video migration is scheduled in early 2009, this leaves us in the unfortunate position of turning off video uploads on the Active website.  We are trying our best to retrieve the current video content and will restore functionality soon.

Our friends over at WePlay posted a great video about Agile standup meetings the other day.

We're particularly impressed by their guest star!  Check out the blog post here.

New advertiser, and a "fun" new way to feature them on the site. We built a Gaiam "skin" for our Mind and Body channel.

I think it's a nice way to strongly brand the page without being obtrusive and getting in the way of the content that the user has come to the site to find. It's also not the most difficult implementation ever - which is nice. The trickiest part was getting the logo on the background image to be clickable. It took an anchor tag being blocked and relatively positioned to make that happen. Of course the hardest part of that was - and isn't everything - dealing with cross-browser DOM/box model inconsistencies.

results.active.com is our hub for communicating race results to people.  We train event timers on how to use the backend portion of the system, and after a given race is completed the timers upload results, making them available to the world at large. 

We typically see a lot of traffic on results.active.com after large events, such as the Marine Corps Marathon or the Chicago Marathon.  And to be fair, results.active.com hasn't had an exemplary performance record when it comes to handling the volume spikes we get on the Monday after major events.

We've just released a major update to results.active.com adding 3X the scalability we had before.  We've also made tweaks to the architecture so that we can add additional servers to the load-balancer should we get any unanticipated increases in volume.

So if you see any issues with site responsiveness please let me know (here on this blog) and I'll look to it personally and immediately.