I’ve got several sites online at the moment ranging from firstpartners.net and the red-piranha enterprise search tool , not forgetting this blog.

A common theme with all of these is the ability to get search engines (like google) to index them. After all ,what is the point of maintaining websites if the content goes unread. How do you notify the search engine of your brand new content? Google site maps are one way - an xml document that you submit with all the relevant details. Included is a tool to generate the sitemaps , written in Python. Still playing with it , but it appears that (a) the format is easy to generate and / or (b) the script will run in Jython (java+python).

Always take these things with a pinch of salt , but the latest ‘hot skills’ survey is available here.

It’s US Based and some of the ‘findings’ make sense (e.g. Websphere and Oracle coming from a large installed base, Project management due to cull of recent years , and above all security). Some others are a bit strange (e.g. Perl is ’stone-cold’ , yet I’m sure is in constant use behind the scenes). Others (like HTML skills) are also listed as stone cold - but anybody who has been trying to make a living as web designer knew this already.

Sun also has an article on building Ajax from scratch here but IMHO you’re better off using a framework every time …