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by Scott Watermasysk.
Original Post: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective
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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.
Person A has written a post on his own weblog that comments on a post in Person B's weblog. This is a form of remote comments--rather than posting the comment directly on Person B's weblog, Person A posts it on his own weblog, then sends a TrackBack ping to notify Person B.
Person A has written a post on a topic that a group of people are interested in. This is a form of content aggregation--by sending a TrackBack ping to a central server, visitors can read all posts about that topic. For example, imagine a site which collects weblog posts about Justin Timberlake. Anyone interested in reading about JT could look at this site to keep updated on what other webloggers were saying about his new album, a photo shoot in a magazine, etc.
The good news is you do not have anything to do. When ever you make a post, .Text will strip out all of the links found in the body of your post and attempt to perform a trackback on each of them.
What does this involve? For each unique link in the body of your post .Text will request the full content of the linked page. It will then search this content for a valid trackback section. This section, among other things, contains the trackback endpoint for the current link. If endpoint is found, a trackback "ping" is made with the details of your post. The details include the title of both your post and blog, the url of your post, a short description of your post.
Most pinged sites will take this one step further (as .Text does) and validate the trackback by searching the contents of the trackbacked url for link supplied as part of the ping. This helps to ensure trackbacks are not used in spam.
Example:
You write: "My friend Bob told a funny joke at OriginalLink."
When you save the post, .Text extracts the link OriginalLink.
Next, the contents of OriginalLink are requested and searched for a trackback endpoint.
If the end point is found, .Text pings the endpoint with your post details.
Your friend Bob's weblog accepts the ping and then (usually) attempts to validate you actually did make a post that included a link to his blog by requesting your page and searching for the OriginalLink.
Anything else?
When linking to external sites, it is good practice to include a short description (excerpt). This makes the trackback much more useful, since it is quite common for the trackbacked site to display the links in a similar fashion to comments. In version 0.96 of .Text if you do not supply a short description, .Text will attempt to display for 100 or so non-HTML characters as your excerpt. In addition, .Text will attempt to trackback both Posts and Articles/Stories.
Finally, I hope to add a trackback management feature to .Text, which should keep the number of re-pings low. At the moment, each time you edit a post, the trackback process occurs.
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