XML sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184 says:
We recommend that you resubmit a Sitemap no more than once per hour



To resubmit your Sitemap using an HTTP request:

1. Issue your request to the following URL:
   www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
   For example, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:
   www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz
   
2. URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:
   www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz
3. Issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing.

A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code

http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php : submit xmlsitemap to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Bing (Live.com) and Moreover.com at once

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35738 : common sitemap errors

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php : xmlsitemap protocol

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/
      <lastmod>2005-01-01
      <changefreq>monthly
      <priority>0.8
   
 

http://www.iteam5.net/francesco/sitemap_gen/ : ASP scripts for sitemap gen


http://www.davidtan.org/where-to-submit-ping-your-xml-sitemaps/ : ping URLs for google, bing, yahoo, ask, msn(moreover)

1. http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml
2. $pingurl = “www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=” . urlencode($url);
3. $pingurl = “http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=” . urlencode($url);
4. $pingurl = “http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=” . $appid . “&url=” . urlencode($url);
5. $pingurl = “http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=” . urlencode($url);

Yahoo's got appid field. http://www.bluefalconmarketing.com/blog/seo/ping-sitemap says:

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml can be used


BUT
http://choosyinfo.com/how-to-ping-your-sitemap-to-bing-google-and-yahoo.html says you could just use
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=[sitemap address]
http://www.catanich.com/sitemap-ping-services.asp confirms this.




To serve the sitemap.xml as static content from grails server:
http://markmail.org/message/53gvhz5evsdcwszg#query:grails%20serve%20static%20files+page:1+mid:jk77y24e6nn42dqq+state:results : says just copy it to the web-app folder


Use http://web-sniffer.net/ to check http request and response headers. Verify that you server is serving your sitemap as content-type= xml


http://www.blogjer.com/2008/03/05/cross-domain-sitemap-via-robotstxt/ :cross domain sitemaps
If you are hosting on your domain sitemaps for your clients' website(different domains)


http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/DotNet/Tools/UrlEncode/Encode.aspx : You can use this url encoder before using your sitemap url in the ping request
So the ping url for google becomes "www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http%3a%2f%2fwww.domain.com%2fsitemap.xml" 
instead of "www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml"