Gruber and Haughey on TrackBack
DaringFireball on TrackBack
There’s a nice critique of TrackBack over at Daring Fireball that has a lot of people talking. John Gruber argues that linking combined with referrer tracking “should be enough,” and that “TrackBack is unnecessary as a connector between web sites.”
By itself, TrackBack isn’t necessary, but for many people, referrers aren’t enough. TrackBack becomes necessary because:
- TrackBacks don’t require links from the referring site (that sends the TrackBack), whereas referrers do.
- TrackBacks create relationships between individual permalinked posts, whereas referrers only create relationships between pages and websites.
- TrackBacks allow category-specific aggregation, whereas referrers can’t aggregate anything - without extra scripting involved.
There are a number of good comments on John’s critique at onfocus.
Which brings me to…
Haughey’s Posted Elsewhere
Matt Haughey commented on the onfocus post mentioned above and mentioned his Posted Elsewhere miniblog, which can be found on his site on the lower right. I asked him about it via email, and he told me that he does it using the Movable Type standalone TrackBack script. After he makes a comment elsewhere, he uses the script to ping his Posted Elsewhere category with a title, blog name, excerpt and permalink URL, which then show up on his site. The downside to this is that he has to fill in the standalone form whenever he makes a comment. This makes me think it would be great if there was a “TrackBack URL” input within the comment form of TrackBack enabled weblogs. Then he could leave a comment and ping his Posted Elsewhere category, all in one step.
- 12 Jun 03
- blogging, matt haughey, movable type, software
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