For some reason, I was never able to get my head around the concept of Trackbacks. But after reading Shelley Powers' posts this week on the topic, explaining how Trackbacks allow threading of conversations across different blogs and talking about social software, I had that Eureka moment, and it all became clear and convincing. (Duh, remote comments. Why couldn't I get that before?) So I've finally implemented Trackback here. I haven't quite figured out how to display the number of Trackbacks on my posts on the front page yet, but that will eventually happen. (Ah, the joys of using your own home-grown content management system....) In the meantime, you can find any Trackbacks, assuming I ever get any, under the comments for each individual post. I also didn't implement the RDF stuff that allows Movable Type blogs to auto-discover the correct Trackback URL. I'm of two minds about that. It's a neat idea, but I'm very proud of the fact that my pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional (and would as Strict but for a rendering misfeature in Mozilla). I'm sure the lack of RDF will disappoint Shelley, who's working on a book about RDF. :-) I'm going to investigate that some more, but for now, you can find the trackback URL for each post on the individual page.
Update: I did what I should have done before posting this and went to the Movable Type Trackback Blog, where I found a post that led me to the answer on how to count Trackbacks. So now that's implemented.
Posted at 5:08 AM
Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.
This site is copyright © 2002-2024, Ralph Brandi.