A microcampaign to turn on autodiscovery...
1) Key Problems with Movable Type. If you're a Movable Type user then you probably share a few key experiences with me. To start off with, you've probably mis-spelt it Moveable Type more than a few times. You've probably chortled to yourself as you realised your mistake. How foolish you've been. Ha! The other thing you've probably done at some point is scratch your head to the point of bleeding about this whole "Trackback" malarky. I know I have. I know because my outboard brain tells me so.
2) Solve the Trackback confusion by turning on 'Autodiscovery'. One of the most confusing aspects of the whole Trackback debacle is this idea that a different URL is used to ping for trackback than the URL that you use to visit the post itself. This aspect of the relationship is essentially very simple, but it's quite hard to explain and so remains essentially incomprehensible to many web-users. So it's important wherever possible to not draw attention to this process - in fact to conceal its workings as much as possible. The best way to do that is by encouraging the use of autodiscovery. Autodiscovery works like this - when you post something that includes a link to a trackback-enabled weblog, your version of Movable Type goes and has a look at the trackback-enabled weblog's page and tries to find the trackback URL associated with the thing you're linking to. Then it pings it. Nice and easy. You don't have to know the trackback URL (which means they don't have to display the trackback URL anywhere as well). It also means that there's no clunky manual pinging process. It's all nice and neat and self-contained and (more importantly) easy to explain to punters. So why don't you go anc check that autodiscovery is turned on right now...
3) Trackback manners. In fact, I think there's probably only one set of circumstances where it's not a good idea to use auto-discovery, and that's the same set of circumstances when it's not appropriate to use Trackback at all. As far as I'm concerned there are at least two of these. Firstly, there's when you don't accept trackback pings yourself. Frankly, if you're not prepared to maintain your place in the embedded conversation, then you don't deserve to participate at all. The other circumstance when you shouldn't enable Trackback at all is when you're maintaining a pure and commentary-less link-log - like the side-panels on kottke.org or anil dash. I think it's important to try and remember what Trackback is for and what it's not for - it's not supposed to be simply a way for you to get a link to your site on highly-trafficked weblogs (although clearly that's what some people use it for). It's supposed to be a way of maintaining the links between posts in such a way that the thread of a conversation can be maintained. If you're not contributing to the conversation in any way, then there's no need for you to use Trackback. In fact every time you do so, you slightly diminish the utility of Trackback and the likelihood of people following the links therein...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Don't want to ask too much of you, but... It would be a great service if you wrote up a "how to" describing how you got trackback to work as you did (with the sites inline like that). The popup window business is practically a trackback killer for me - in addition to being yet another template to keep up to date, I've had about enough of popup windows of any kind.
→ Posted by: Michael at March 13, 2003 4:01 PM
Would it help if I just posted up a copy of my template somewhere? I should do a proper write-up, but I've got so many other things I should be doing (to earn money) instead...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 13, 2003 4:30 PM
That would be great. Like you are, I am busy, and like you were, I am totally perplexed by trackback in general. I get the final product, I just can't visualize the process. The way you've simplified the presentation of the links is a great leg up, and seeing how that happened in the code would probably be plenty. Thanks in advance.
→ Posted by: Michael at March 13, 2003 4:46 PM
I've got Trackback autodiscovery turned on, but actually implementing Trackback into my own posts is proving to be a pain in the arse (and thus meanining I unintentionally fall into your "lazy no good blog leeches sucking readers off my traffic" category). If you did share the secret of a transparent Trackback set-up, that would be a great service to the blogging community. There doesn't seem to be anything else on the Internet explaining it...
→ Posted by: Marcus at March 13, 2003 5:27 PM
i was initally flummoxed by trackback when i started using movable type just over a month ago, but i figured it out by doodling a diagram on a scrap of paper. maybe that was easy for me because i studied some logic at university. once i realised that the trackback code could be pasted into my individual post template without any hacking or similar tomfoolery everything worked fine. maybe that's what confuses people, the fact that since trackback has its own neat little separate template and pop-up window thingy, most users fear they'll break it if they try to modify it for their own needs?
→ Posted by: Mac at March 13, 2003 7:38 PM
My one reservation when it comes to autodiscovery is that it applies itself every time you rebuild an entry, which means you end up repeatedly pinging whoever you've linked to when you delete a comment or fix a mistake. (Unless there's some setting I've missed in Movable Type?) Other than that - the more invisible the process the better, although I've merged trackbacks and comments (with the SimpleComments plugin) which maybe confuses matters further...
→ Posted by: Jack at March 13, 2003 8:25 PM
Of course, not that I don't think that Trackback is a superb idea and all that, but what if - like, well, me for instance - you're a blinkered and insular weblogger who never writes the sorts of posts that anyone in their right mind would ever consider linking to or, indeed, tracking back to? For anyone with far too great an idea of their own importance - so probably like most bloggers - there's nothing more dispiriting than a whole line of zeroes in brackets running their way down one's beautifully-designed web page (mental note: must get out more).
→ Posted by: Vaughan at March 13, 2003 10:58 PM
I had autodiscovery turned on for about the first month I had the MT setup, and it made the posting procedure as slow as a wet fortnight. So I turned it off again.
→ Posted by: Graham at March 14, 2003 1:02 AM
Well, I've tracked to you, autodiscovered a link which I assume is your trackback log or something, and now I wonder if this is working or not... I can't find your trackback log for this post!!
→ Posted by: JimmyT at March 14, 2003 1:43 AM
To Jimmy - I incorporate my trackbacks into the posts themselves - they're appended to the end of the entry (sometimes the page needs to have another comment added for them to show up properly). To Vaughan - we the same is true - lots of my posts don't get any trackbacks at all, but because I incorporate them directly into my post, you never see any zeroes anywhere.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at March 14, 2003 9:00 AM
I explained trackback to a friend a while ago as an automated version of emailing someone to let them know you'd posted a comment on an entry of theirs, and having them insert an 'update' link at the end of said entry to say that you'd commented on it. Which makes me wonder what the point of having it is at all.
As an automated system, it's open to the sort of advertising abuse you point out (although the blog author can always delete such pings if he or she wishes). Worse, it gives the *appearance* of conversation when actually there is none. If a blog receives a stack of pings, it looks as if its author is engaged in a 'conversation' when actually they're just being used as a high-profile bulletin board. If they were truly engaged in a conversation, they would be *talking back* in a separate post or comment on their blog, and would be dropping links to other blogs into that conversation as a matter of course.
Automating this process may relieve blog authors of any sense of obligation to hold up their side of the conversation. If they don't want to hold up their side of the conversation, that's fine, but to give the appearance that they are simply by hosting a bunch of trackback links seems a little misleading; and if they go further than hosting the trackback link by actually commenting on it, well, isn't that the sort of 'manual linking-back' that trackback is supposed to replace?
I can see trackback making sense in group blogs like MeFi where there is no single author being engaged in conversation; I can even see it making sense in high profile blogs where a community grows up around a single-author blog whose members want to talk among themselves with or without the blog author's involvement (although surely comments boxes are sufficient for that; you can link to your blog posts in a comment if necessary); but it makes no sense as a replacement for the blog author actively taking part in a cross-blog conversation. The only argument for it might be that a trackback ping is more discreet than a direct email, a cough behind the hand rather than an outright request for recognition and response; and that seems ridiculous. Those on the receiving end of a ping know that it was deliberately sent by another human being seeking their attention (or free publicity); how is that more discreet than a one line email saying 'Hi, I liked your post on XYZ, you might like to read my response here...'?
A couple of days ago I finally got around to changing my trackback system to mimic yours, Tom - trackbacks embedded at the end of posts (though not relying solely on autodiscovery as you recommend). But today I'm pulling the whole thing out.
→ Posted by: Rory at March 14, 2003 11:39 AM
This is a bit like the offside rule in soccer, isn't it?
"No, look, it's really simple, honest - let me run it past you one more time..."
My head hurts!
→ Posted by: mike at March 14, 2003 11:57 AM
Hi, members of the plasticbag.org community (and Tom, who receives this comment in an email automatically). You might like to read my comment on Tom's post here:
http://speedysnail.com/2003/03.html#442
...although it's actually just a slight rewording of my comment above, broken up into proper paragraphs.
Trackbacks? We don't need no stinkin'... etc.
→ Posted by: Rory at March 14, 2003 12:12 PM
There's a useful thread on the Movable Type support forums on to include trackbacks in your posts - I used it and it worked fine.
http://www.movabletype.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=3e71e6d14c4affff;act=ST;f=18;t=8952;hl=trackback+and+include
Also, I'm sure my instance of MT only pings the trackback with the first publish and not at each rebuild. But I'll have to look into that ...
→ Posted by: Jon Curnow at March 14, 2003 2:35 PM
oh, the irony! "it's not supposed to be simply a way for you to get a link to your site on highly-trafficked weblogs" ... followed by a half dozen trackback links from relatively random sites... it's almost, dare I say it, like some Comic Relief wheeze. I don't mean to be so naughty, sorry, but it's Friday and I want to go home...
→ Posted by: Bobbie at March 14, 2003 2:37 PM
Bobbie, all the sites seemed to discuss the pros/cons related to this post and its ideas. Some where shorter like mine but all seemed fairly relevent. I purposely made sure I added at least some content in response to plastic bag, mostly agreeing ;). I really think that's the most you can expect.
→ Posted by: James at March 16, 2003 12:26 AM
I just installed TrackBack on to my Drupal installation, and it all works fine. I've even put a link to my site from MetaFilter. Traffic-me-do!
I think it's one of the coolest things ever, actually.
→ Posted by: Tom Morris at March 22, 2003 11:15 PM