Hey...
I just build 2 application that is used to help your googlebot indexing.
The first one is the XML generator. I bet all you guys know what is it . I think it is somehow useful if any of you got no idea on how to write XML and and dont have python installed in your server.
My script is a simple PHP scripts that create a XML sitemap which is used to be submitted to google.
http://www.hotwebtools.com/gmap


Second stuff 'I like most' is another sitemap generator. If you had previously create a XML sitemap which has hundreds or thousands of dynamic pages where a common crawler will find it hard to understand, I had created a php scripts that crawl your XML sitemap and convert it into a readable human sitemap.
http://www.hotwebtools.com/extractor/

**Give me a feedback on how do you feel when using my scripts, so that i can improve.
Thanks

What's the whole deal with the priority thing. I have all mine set a set number. Should I change it so they are all different?

Well, it is just to tell Googlebot which one is the most important and which one is less important. Usually, ppl will set homepage to 0.8 - 1.0 and subpages somewhere lower than that. This is what I have done for my website.
http://www.hotwebtools.com/sitemap.xml

But does that accomplish anything?

Im not sure how google use that data. But it was stated in FAQ section that XML sitemap should contain the importaness of a web site. I personally think that it will be used to set how frequently googlebot should crawl your site

I can see no reason why google would allow us to prioritise pages unless they intended to use that information. If you give the most important pages on your website a higher ranking, say 1.0, I would think that Google would make sure these are reindexed the most often. I appreciate this conflicts with the setting for update frequency but there has to be some logic to it.

No body know exactly how google does its job. Thus, the best way is to follow their guidelines. If they said that it should contain 'priority', then we better do it in the recommended way.

Ok ... this is just babble to me ... I know they say to prioritize your links ... but WHY? That is the question we must ask!

This is copied from Google FAQ:

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites

Amazingly, i got my 41 pages indexed by Google within days.
Try to type ' site:www.webmasterwatch.net ' in Google
It got 41 indexed. That website only start a couple of weeks ago. I never got so much page indexed in weeks. Before XML sitemap, it takes months to index 40+ pages.
Trust me, create a good XML sitemap, then submit it to Google. No matter how you create it, either you write your own XML or use online generator, as long as it follow the guidelines, you will see your result in no time.

How many days does it take for your pages to show up on Google after you submit your sitemap? Also, will all the links in the sitemap show up on Google?

it depends on Google, i dont know how many link will be indexed. They seems to select which page is more useful for searchers. Approximately 1 week after i submit my XML sitemap and it shows up in google index