Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

OK, I get asked this over and over again, so hopefully, I can set the record straight once and for all.

Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

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.

[TrackBack Beginners]

If you interested in the finer details, you can read the spec here

How do I use Trackbacks in .Text?

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:

1. You write: "My friend Bob told a funny joke at OriginalLink."
2. When you save the post, .Text extracts the link OriginalLink.
3. Next, the contents of OriginalLink are requested and searched for a trackback endpoint.
4. If the end point is found, .Text pings the endpoint with your post details.
5. 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.

Update:
I also forgot to mention when viewing your blog's referrals, you can instantly convert any link into a trackback simply by clicking the “Create” link on the referral page. This is a handy way to display relevant links from sites which have yet to implement trackbacks.

posted on Friday, February 06, 2004 10:17 PM

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Feedback

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Hey Scott,

Iv'e been meaning to ask this for a while now and your post reminded me of the question: Do you plan on creating a filter feature for referrals? My referrers list is filled with google and yahoo referrals that I'd love to filter out...

# Omer van Kloeten 2/7/2004 4:09 PM

How to Trackback?

# David Cumps 2/7/2004 3:51 PM

Trackbacks in .Text

Trackback article in ScottWater.

# チャム＆レオ's Blog 2/7/2004 5:15 PM

Trackbacks and .Text

# Tech Guru 2/7/2004 7:25 PM

How Weblog Trackbacks work for .Text

# XML-Extranet 2/7/2004 7:56 PM

Scott W's Trackback article!

# Chris Hammond's Blog 2/8/2004 6:27 PM

Trackback description

# Delphi Developers' Singapore Fortress of Solitude 2/8/2004 7:22 PM

Trackback?

# Tinderblog 2/9/2004 2:19 AM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Hmm, can we have a list of where the trackback pings are coming from?

# chewy 2/9/2004 5:55 AM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Scott,

Why doesn't .Text trackback work with Userland's?

As an example, I'm going to post links here to a specific website, delphi.weblogs.com

Let's see whether the trackbacks are working.
http://delphi.weblogs.com/newsItems/trackback/?u=delphiweblogscom&p=424&link=http%3A%2F%2Fdelphi.weblogs.com%2F2004%2F02%2F06%23a424


http://delphi.weblogs.com/newsItems/trackback/ping$424

# chewy 2/9/2004 11:44 AM

Trackbacks

# Duck Blog 2/9/2004 7:24 PM

Trackbacks

# Duck Blog 2/9/2004 7:27 PM

Take Outs: The Digital Doggy Bag of Blog Bits for 9 February 2004

The daily list of stuff I found interesting while blogreading.

# Enjoy Every Sandwich 2/9/2004 7:45 PM

Understanding Trackbacks

# The XML Files 2/9/2004 8:37 PM

Using Trackback in Blog

# Chenluyi's Blog 2/9/2004 11:55 PM

Trackbacks in Blogging

# Impersonation Failure 2/10/2004 2:40 AM

Trackbacks in Blogging

ScottW the creator of .Text has an article that explains how Trackbacks work. He also has some links to the trackback specs and a beginner tutorial.

# Impersonation Failure 2/10/2004 2:41 AM

re: Created trackbacks don't show

# Jeff Overstreet's Weblog 2/10/2004 5:45 AM

Scoble

Scoble

# Pingback/TrackBack 2/10/2004 1:55 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

How do un-Trackback when you accidently link to the wrong page?

How do you prevent Trackback spam?

# Dylan Greene 2/10/2004 2:13 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

How do un-Trackback when you accidently link to the wrong page?

How do you prevent Trackback spam?

# Dylan Greene 2/10/2004 2:57 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Strange, not sure how I got a double post. The system should prevent that. Oh, and double trackbacks too. :)

# Dylan Greene 2/10/2004 2:58 PM

.NET Happenings #1

# MasterMaq.NET 2/10/2004 2:09 PM

Scott W on Trackbacks in .Text

# Spong's Blog 2/10/2004 3:28 PM

Test: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

http://ms.blogger.cn/peon/posts/207.aspx

# carfield 2/10/2004 8:35 PM

Trackback?

# Tinderblog 2/11/2004 11:58 PM

# Tim Walters .NET Flash Blog 2/18/2004 8:49 PM

SQL Reporting Services

# Tim Walters .NET Flash Blog 2/18/2004 9:30 PM

Wither Trackbacks?

# McCall Voyager 2/24/2004 12:30 PM

Trackback Experiment.

This is my Excerpt.

# Scott Munro 3/15/2004 6:18 AM

Trackback Experiment Results.

The results of my trackback experiment. I can now see how the Excerpt, Title URL and EntryName fields are used. Still a little puzzled by the Source Name and Source URL fields. Anyone have an idea?

# Scott Munro 3/15/2004 6:35 AM

Trackbacks and the Community Starter Kit

# Keith 'StarPilot' Barrows 3/17/2004 10:50 AM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

I've been getting an error when trying to create a trackback of a referer:
Post operation failed. There was a baseline problem posting your Trackback.

Any insight?

# travis 3/19/2004 1:27 AM

Trackbacks and the Community Starter Kit

# Keith 'StarPilot' Barrows 3/30/2004 2:42 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

http://ms.mblogger.cn/peon/posts/207.aspx
It must be v0.96 ?

# carfield 4/30/2004 9:03 PM

Trackbacks explained...

# Jono's Blog 5/1/2004 7:19 PM

Scott Water explains tracebacks

# Dan Crevier's Blog 5/2/2004 9:06 PM

Trackbacks in .Text

This seems to have turned into a bit of a test bed for some of .Text's trackback features.

# Stuart Radcliffe's Blog 5/3/2004 11:18 AM

re: trackback on .text

# yamb 5/6/2004 9:34 AM

Understanding Trackbacks

# Blogosphere Admin 6/3/2004 5:38 PM

's kijken

# slagers's Blog 6/6/2004 11:10 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Trackback Test...

# Test 6/10/2004 5:31 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Test...Test...

# Test 6/10/2004 5:35 PM

Prueba de Trackback

# FoxCorp 6/11/2004 11:40 PM

Prueba de Trackback

# FoxCorp 6/11/2004 11:41 PM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

Trackback test:

http://www.foxcorp.org/archive/2004/06/12/391.aspx

Works??

# Fox 6/12/2004 2:43 AM

re: Trackbacks: The .Text Perspective

<a herf = Test" target=_new>http://thestarseeker.net/Blog/archive/2004/06/14/242.aspx>Test</a>

# Test 6/15/2004 7:14 PM

Trackbacks

# Mikael S 7/4/2004 11:47 AM

TrackBack: What and How

# Alex Dong's Weblog 7/20/2004 11:41 PM

Trackbacks

H

# Mikael S 7/26/2004 10:16 AM