Trackbacks September 17, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, meta-blog, internet , trackbackThis blog has trackbacks enabled. For those who use blogger, blogdrive, and so on this may be an unfamiliar concept, and it’s fairly new to me so I shall attempt an explanation.
comments
Comments added to blog entries help to give the blog author a sense of audience, and motivation. They also build community links, because if I comment on your blog, you can usually click on my name in your comments list and that will redirect you to my blog and vice versa. But how can you follow which people’s blogs I may have left a comment on ? - you can’t. So If I spend a lot of my time writing comments on other people’s blogs, then my writing is dissipated all over the place with no easy way of tracking it.
blogs
So some people write blog entries which refer to other people’s blogs instead of writing comments. Nancy White’s blog, for example, has a lot of these type of blog entries, linking to a wide network of individuals and resources.
But how do you know if somebody has blogged about you?
trackbacks
This is where trackbacks come in, to complete the circuit and connect related blogs in both directions. It’s easiest to give an example: Two weeks ago, I finally published a little video and discussion starter about waste incineration. There are no comments on that entry, but if you look underneath the entry where it says “comments (0)” it also says “Trackback(2)” Click there, and you will see that two people have decided to write something related. Adam Timworth’s is just a quick comment and link really, but it’s quite likely that Cllr Andrew Brown came across my article as a result of reading “one man and his blog” and then decided to supply quite a lot of useful information on the subject, including a timely notice about the London open house event this Sunday.
pings
I lament the dilution of useful, precise technical jargon ( on Contentious Weblog ) and “ping” used to have a specific meaning on the Internet, to do with testing the connectivity time between nodes. The Blogging world has developed it’s own specific meaning, where a ‘ping’ is a notification to a blog server to let it know that a blog entry has been made on another. That’s how these two people managed to get my blog to link to their own articles, they ‘pinged’ my blog so they appear as trackback entries on it. This is done by scooping up the trackback URL for the entry, which appears underneath “Continuing the discussion…..” and in this case is http://slartibartfast.ultralab.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/150 , and then pasting this into the ‘ping’ box in their own blog software when making their entries. In some cases I understand, the software can be set to automatically check all of the links within an entry and set up the appropriate pings.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
I think these trackbacks are needlessly complex. It requires special software and user actions to apply them. It is much simpler to record referrals. You make a blog entry commenting on something I wrote in my blog (if anything interesting were going on there), you add a link in your blog entry to my blog entry, then you or someone else uses that link, and then your blog entry shows up on my list of referrals here: http://odur.let.rug.nl/kleiweg_bin/lnplinks
Thanks for a great explanation - I wondered what trackback was - and now I understand why my blog has a bit about ‘ping’ on it as well!
I think I understand your comment better than Peter’s!
Thanks Eve. I like Peter’s method because it makes use of functionality which already exists in every browser, to tell websites where they have just come form, so that is indeed a simpler and more elegant solution than having to implement trackback functionality into every pice of blog software. The only thing is, I’m not sure how most people are supposed to be able to get the information from their websever statistics page onto their blog.
You don’t need access to your webserver’s log to track reverrals. All you need is a little JavaScript in your pages and some cgi-scripting on your server. If that is too hard, you could use some web-based service to keep track of referrals for you, such as: http://www.truefresco.org/referrers.htm
Yes I just stated to use the one Pete mentions, but I wonder about how accurtate it is sometimes. Blogdrive allows you to have pings enabled but they are done via something called weblog.com so not quite the same as what you are describing Andy. They just ping this service when I update the blog, not very useful really.