Trackback Integration

A good point about the way track­back ought to be an ‘invisible’ fea­ture is made at Plas​ticbag.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 Plas​ticbag.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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