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November 9, 2005

Trackback for beginners

I’ve been blooging for over a year now and still don’t get Trackbacks, that is, until now. Raydr’s Weblog does the most basic, beginner-friendly explaination of trackbacks I’ve seen.

A trackback is your blog’s way of letting ANOTHER blog know that you wrote about them.

For example, I’m going to refer you to another site that explains more about blogs:
http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/03/what_is_trackback_part_one.shtml

BlogiZm (Raydr’s Weblog) is going to let that site know that I wrote about it. In turn, that site is going to put a note at the bottom of THEIR blog saying that I wrote about them – with a link to this post!

Kind of cool, huh?

learn more!

Why you would use trackbacks is more complicated but I assume that part of it is that not everyone tracks their visitors like I do or have so many that they can’t manually update this info. At any rate, if you have trackback as part of your blog, and you link to, write about, or just think it relates, add the trackback link to your post.

P.S. I’m still learning the ropes so I may make mistakes. Sorry if I flooded anybody’s post with trackbacks.

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  • At 8:41 am on November 17, 2005, archshrk commented:

    Yeah, I noticed that, too. Actually, if you follow the link in Heartless Goo you’ll see how that worked against me. First, I posted a comment, then I linked to the article within my own post and then I added a trackback. So if you look at their comments, you’ll see me 3 times. That’s when I decided to look into trackbacks further.

    I also learned that Blogger does not support Trackbacks. They use a feature called Linkback but works only within Blogger.

  • At 8:11 am on November 17, 2005, Radioactive Jam commented:

    So far (with WordPress) I can generate a pingback to myself by linking an earlier post. I have no idea if the same thing happens when I link someone else’s url.

  • At 6:04 pm on December 18, 2005, archshrk commented:

    More trackback fun…
    http://guff.szub.net/trackback/2005/1111
    Now pardon me for taking this from another site but I wanted to make sure you get the information. Please follow the link and check out the WordPress Feature the author intoduces.

    Linking to a trackback, as opposed to just displaying the URL in some textual fashion round about the comments section of a post, is a bit of a problem in WordPress. This is because it doesn’t really take you anywhere, at least not in the way one tends to expect, if you follow the link. The point of a trackback URL is to—and hopefully this is obvious—send a trackback “ping” from somewhere else, preferably another blog. Doing anything else with it is like banging on a door with no house attached, and as far as WordPress is concerned this is a pretty stupid thing to do. So if you visit a trackback URL from a WordPress blog, WordPress assumes you’re more interested in the post it derives from, and redirects you to it.

    All well and good for those who understand why it works the way it does: just right-click or hover over the link and perform a bit of copy/paste. But for anyone new to WordPress, or anyone not the least bit interested in anything but getting that damn link to show a Trackback!!!, this is a confusing way to behave. As mentioned above, one can skip the link method and just display the trackback URL raw, but some don’t find this a good way of dealing with it. And on sites with especially long URLs, it causes issues when the URL is wider than the blog’s content area.

    Also of note is the wikipedia entry for Trackback

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