Trackback Integration

A good point about the way trackback ought to be an ‘invisible’ feature is made at Plasticbag.org. (You might need to view the front page to see the idea in action)

I must be missing something though, as I had to hunt down the trackback url to ping for in the site archives, and the post seems to suggests I won’t be able to do that in future.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I may need to read up on what that ‘auto-discovery’ checkbox in Moveable Type’s configuration actually does.

Update: Right, here goes. With Trackback Autodiscovery switched on, a Moveable Type-powered site can ping other Trackback enabled sites without the user lifting a finger - the application scans a post for outgoing links, establishes whether there’s a Trackback-enabled site at the other end, then pings away. The result of all this activity behind the scenes is the same as what geekier folk are doing when they manually ping a Trackback url: a link back to the site doing the pinging appears on the site being pinged. For example, if you follow the link to Plasticbag.org above, you’ll see a link right back here at the bottom of the page.

This is wonderful, because it means people can carry on conversations across the interweb, creating unlikely meshes of ideas and so on and so forth.

So that’s Trackback.

Until I tried it out on this site, I didn’t quite understand what Tom was driving at, now I do: given that all the poorly explained stuff above applies, there is no need for those Trackback links that appear below to exist - the whole process can go on without visitors to a site having to grapple with a new concept if links from other sites referencing a post are simply displayed.

There is a slight problem though. As things stand, not all Moveable Type users have Autodiscovery switched on, some may not want to turn it on, still more people using Trackback aren’t using Moveable Type, and these people need to know that a site can be pinged and the url to ping. Which takes us back to square one: a link marked Trackback under every post.

For the time being, I think i’ll sit on the fence: links to any sites pinging this site will show up at the tail end of the relevant entry, but there will also be a Trackback link to click, giving people the trackback url for the entry.

And yes, I am aware of the crushing irony of my bothering about all this when hardly anyone reads this site, and most of those who do probably aren’t thinking, ‘Hot damn! If I don’t ping that entry on Submit Response soon, I’m going to explode!’

Another Update: Frownland has a better solution than mine, displaying the trackback url on individual archived pages rather than the front page. I think I’ll nick that.

Update III, The Final Update: Right, I think I’m happy now: on the front page a link that reads “Comments & Trackbacks” takes you to the individual archive page for that entry. Once there, Comments and Trackbacks are displayed underneath the post, and the Trackback url displayed along with other bits of metadata, like the post’s category, for the benefit of those who wish to manually ping the post in question. Next up: sorting out a more palatable layout for the individual post pages, since they look awfully muddled after these various changes.

Posted at 6pm on 29/01/03 by Jack Mottram to the site news, web category.
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