Diadematus for Google is a handy little free tool for creating Site maps. I tried a number of others but they all seemed like hard work or provided invalid output. Google's suggested Python solution is great for those who have Python on their server and are totally comfortable with installing a program there but again, it looked like hard work for the majority of us.

Diadematus is installed on your computer in the MediaCET folder. You can then run it from there to go to your site and create an xml site map in the folder of your choice. I place it in the same folder that mirrors the site on my computer and then just upload it via FTP and then submit it to Google.

However, there is a bug in the version that I downloaded, Diadematus 1.01.

The xml tags in the Diadematus generated site maps say "changefreg"; this should say "changefreq". Google was robust enough to put up with this initially but lately has parsed the sitemaps with the incorrect term and spat them out and says that they are in error. Changing freg to freq globally seems to solve the problem.

I e-mailed Mediacet, the makers of Diadematus, in September 2006, about the problem, but never received a response, and it doesn't look like an updated version is available.

Diadematus also doesn't like mailto: URIs, and will say they are invalid while processing your site.

For those of you interested, Diadematus is the taken from the name of the orb weaving spider, Araneus diadematus.

Other Sitemap tools:

AutoMapIt is a service thate can do site maps for websites up to 500 pages for free. Auto-pings Google, Yahoo, and others when your maps are uploaded. Covers Google, HTML, RSS, ROR and more for sitemap formats. Lots of available filters and tweaks to get clean sitemaps. Best of all is that it will run your maps and keep them updated versus needing to start a program or to remember to upload them.

SoftPlus GSiteCrawler has been described as having "great results, it is free and will do XML, HTML, text, and robots.text files among others."

Free Site Map Generator "has some good features. Auto upload new sitemap to your site. Auto ping google when a new sitemap is uploaded."

http://www.rorweb.com/rormap.htm that creates a sitemap in xml that you can name sitemap.xml or ror.xml and put a meta tag on your site that tells ALL bots about the existance of this site map. It comes in 2 free versions a web service that will do upto 1000 URLs and a downloadable windows version that will do upto 5000 URLs.

www.ssrichardmontgomery.com/sitemap.html
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

See http://www.sitemaps.org/ for a full explanation.