unraveled

About Posted Elsewhere

Posted Elsewhere is a new feature of unraveled, accessible from the right-hand menu. It’s simply a miniblog of my selected comments on other weblogs.

I previously mentioned this idea when I spotted it on A Whole Lotta Nothing. I emailed Matt Haughey, and he briefly explained how he did it. He installed the standalone TrackBack implementation and used TrackBack’s content aggregation feature to aggregate his comments. (A Beginners Guide to TrackBack, under “Content Aggregation” explains this feature well.)

I followed Matt Haughey’s example, and now have my own Posted Elsewhere and Posted Elsewhere RSS feed. Here’s how to add a Posted Elsewhere feature to your weblog:

  1. Download the standalone TrackBack implementation.
  2. Install standalone TrackBack according to the documentation.
  3. Create a new weblog in Movable Type.
  4. Create a new index template called “Main Index” with this index template. Customize this template as necessary.
  5. If you wish to have an RSS feed to accompany your weblog, create a new index template called “RSS 2.0 Index” with this index template. Again, customize this template as necessary.
  6. Create a new category in the new weblog, and name it whatever you wish.
  7. Click “Edit category attributes,” and set “Accept incoming TrackBack pings” to on.
  8. Click Save, and the TrackBack URL for this category will be shown.
  9. On line 201 of tb.cgi (the standalone TrackBack script) enter value="trackback_url" within the input named ping_url, where trackback_url is the TrackBack URL from step 8.

You’re now ready to send pings to your weblog. After you’ve posted a comment on another weblog that you would like to include, follow these steps to ping your weblog:

  1. Open http://yourserver.com/pathto/tb.cgi?__mode=send_form in your browser.
  2. Copy your comment text up to 255 characters. (I use Word’s wordcount feature to quickly trim the comment text.) Update: See Matt Haughey’s comment below.
  3. Paste the comment excerpt into the excerpt field, and complete the form by entering the original entry title, blog name and permalink URL of the original entry.
  4. Click Send. If the ping was successful, the form will report “Ping successfully sent.”
  5. Check your index and RSS feed to make sure they’re displaying your pings correctly.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, and I look forward to seeing other’s implementations of Posted Elsewhere.

Comments

  1. You actually don’t have to be precise on the 255 characters in the excerpt. I usually copy and paste the whole first paragraph into it, and MT just cuts everyone after 255 off automatically.

    Matt Haughey on 24 Jun 03

  2. Wonderful!! I hadn’t yet gotten into the whole trackback ping stuff, but this is now an added incentive to do so. Thanks for the detailed instructions.

    Beth on 24 Jun 03

  3. Hey Joshua, that’s a sweet feature, and thanks for the great instructions on how to set it up.

    Keith on 24 Jun 03

  4. Another great idea (that Justin figured out) was that if you have several MT blogs you contribute to, you can automate this whole thing by just pinging your posted elsewhere category, like say if you are also part of a group blog and want a record of those posts on your personal site.

    Matt Haughey on 25 Jun 03

  5. Some directions.

    TrackBack from markpasc.org on 23 Jul 03

  6. Two more excellent advanced widgets for tracking what’s said and seen here and elswhere - and a plug for my favorite webring.

    TrackBack from Live in the Delirious Cool on 21 Aug 03

  7. I’ve had an interesting and challenging 7 days dealing with Movable Type and server upgrade issues, unusual thunder storms, and daily life. In the meantime, the world marches on, and there are plenty of great links to share for today’s feast — CSS lay…

    TrackBack from Brainstorms and Raves on 24 Aug 03

  8. About Posted Elsewhere | unraveled…

    TrackBack from zlog - worth a look on 25 Aug 03

  9. Looks like I’m going to have to do this: http://www.unraveled.com/archives/2003/06/about_posted_elsewhere Ahh, the “fun” of it all…….

    TrackBack from Shane's blog, journal, whateveritis, Part 2 on 6 Feb 04

  10. A request for a “reverse trackback” feature. If you comment somewhere else, “reverse ping” to your own blog. If you don’t understand German just follow the first link or ask me to translate for you.

    TrackBack from Das E-Business Weblog on 16 Dec 04

  11. I’ve had an interesting and challenging 7 days dealing with Movable Type and server upgrade issues, unusual thunder storms, and daily life. In the meantime, the world marches on, and there are plenty of great links to share for today’s feast — CSS lay…

    TrackBack from Brainstorms and Raves on 30 Dec 04

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