Trackbacks 1
UPDATE
adding a technorati link for trackbacks

I am studying trackback. All good bloggers should.

In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

That's from Mena and Ben Trott's A Beginner's Guide to Trackback. They also explain 'ping': "a small message sent from one webserver to another." It's a good intro for the non-technical on trackback. Although it explains some things that are Movable Type-specific, it also explains how to do a manual type of trackback that works with any blogging tool. Much of the following is based in their article. (Movable Type is the tool which Mena and Ben developed.)

Why trackback? Well, if I read something on your blog that I want to comment on in my blog (rather than just comment in your comment area), I can trackback to your blog. The trackback uri is NOT the published uri of the blog itself, it's a special uri that can receive that ping message that my trackback will send along. Then, in your comments area, it will also list my blog as a trackback.

Trackback is a two-way street: my blog has to be able to ping (send that message) and your blog has to be able to accept the ping.

Great. Except that blogger.com (my blog host) doesn't allow for this cool trackback stuff. (Come on, blogger, let's get this going and make it really easy for me. Please.)

So blogger.com help refers you to Haloscan, a service for adding fast-and-easy commenting (including trackbacks) to blogger.com blogs (and others). I just finished the process (requires creating an account at Haloscan) and it was very easy, including an actual Wizard for us blogger.com bloggers. The Wizard works whether you are hosting your blogger.com blog at blogger.com or whether you are hosting on your own server (like me). That's because it's adding html to your blog template which is housed at blogger.com. Included with adding the necessary code, is a backup of your old template, just in case. Wow. You will note an automatic Haloscan post in my blog.

Does it work? Will the PF Hyper Blog now be able to TRACKBACK. And will it be EASY!

Stay tuned.

- posted by Peter Fleck @ Permalink 10:08 AM [to Del.icio.us]