GoBlog 0.13.0: a cleaner sitemap, stable post URLs and an optional footer credit

GoBlog 0.13.0 is mostly about how search engines see your site.

A sitemap search engines can trust

On a live site with 648 URLs in its sitemap, three things were wrong:

• Every entry except posts had its lastmod set to the moment the sitemap was requested. Search engines learn to ignore a date that always says "just now". lastmod is now the page's own update time, or the newest post's for the home page and post listings, and is left out when it is not known.
• /posts was listed twice. Each URL is now listed once.
• 527 of the 648 URLs were tag pages, which only re-list posts already in the sitemap. Tag pages are no longer listed; they still exist and can still be indexed.

changefreq and priority are dropped as well, since Google and Bing ignore both.

Post URLs stop changing when you edit

A post whose title contains a character that gets URL-escaped, such as :, ?, & or ,, had its slug escaped again on every save. Each edit moved the post's canonical URL a little further. Saving is now idempotent, and a migration repairs slugs that were already over-escaped.

Repaired posts get a new canonical URL. The old URLs keep working and their canonical tag points at the new one; they are not redirected.

"Powered by goblog" is a setting

The footer credit now links to goblog.live and can be turned off with Show "Powered by goblog" under Admin → Settings → Appearance. It is rendered from one shared partial, _powered_by, so themes no longer write the link themselves.

Also

• The home page no longer cuts off a site tag line longer than about 40 characters.
• Upgrade notes moved out of the README into UPGRADING.md.

Update your theme

Forest v1.4.0 and Minimal v1.2.0 use the shared footer partial, so the new setting works on them. Both require GoBlog 0.13.0: upgrade GoBlog first, then update the theme from Admin → Themes.

Full notes: v0.13.0 on GitHub.