Fuddland

yay! but she’s a girl… has successfully upgraded movable type too!

whilst this may look like a normal post [and not meaning to belittle the sentiment; i really do mean the ‘yay!’], it is in fact a cleverly disguised test post. i wonder if anyone will notice?

#1

dvd | 2003 / 02 / 14 – 18:06

i think i’m getting there now. so: trackbacks are only possible between blogs that have trackback capabilities [i.e. not possible if one of the blogs does not have a trackback feature]. right? right.

elaboration: this post pinged bsag’s post about upgrading movable type — effectively ‘telling’ the trackback list for her post that i had written something related to it. thus, the converse must also hold: if someone wants to make their post appear in my trackback list, they have to ping my post, which means they have to have some kind of trackback feature enabled on their blog.

the trackback documentation indicates that the developers of movable type hope other weblog developers will integrate the idea into their software. so until that happnens, it seems as though only movable type bloggers can ping each other’s post. shame.

#2

bsag | 2003 / 02 / 14 – 19:17

Double yay! Your trackback appeared on my site as it should! It took me ages to get my head around how Trackback works. For a while I thought that you needed to include the actual Trackback URL (i.e. the cgi script) in the post for it to work. Doh! But actually, you only need the permanent link of the entry, and when you post your entry it scours the URL you’ve cited for Special Trackback Thingies (which is the technical term, you understand), and then a reference to the citing page appears on the cited page.

As you said, it does only work on CMSs with Trackback, and also only if the cited entry has Trackback pings enabled. Otherwise it just says “Nothing to see here, move along” when the citing post goes ping. I think this is right, but it is Friday and my brain hurts.

#3

dvd | 2003 / 02 / 14 – 19:45

yeah, i fell for the ‘posting the cgi-url’ trap for a bit. the pennies finally all dropped at once when i set up a bookmarklet — something i’d not done until now.

and yes you’re right: it’s friday. i’m off to the su for the gangsters-and-molls themed valentine night — god i love university!

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