I just read with interest Movable Type Product Manager, the fantastic Byrne Reese’s “Implementing Ping Back for Movable Type“. This is fantastic and long overdue!
This is good news for all bloggers. Someday soon trackbacks can be retired.
The greatest reason why this is good news is because pingbacks, unlike trackbacks, require us to do nothing. Trackbacks require you to copy and paste a special URL1
As he suggests, “[pingback] is marginally less spammy than TrackBack”, but he has the greatest reason wrong. The reason why it is as implimented in in WordPress is because WordPress follows the “MAY requirement” — he has you there — of confirming that the link exists in the article that pung2).
Regardless of how “many WordPress blogs out there, it would be a disservice to Movable Type users not to”. If you are using some other blogging platform that doesn’t automattically linkback articles using pinkback, ask them to end the madness (or give us something even better)of an experience that unnecessarily requires your work, trackback.
TrackBack is pretty broken as it stands today. The discovery mechanism is god-awful, and the protocol is prone to exploitation and spam. Generally speaking, given the percentage of TrackBacks that are spam, it makes me wonder why bother at all.
If you are a software developer I highly recommend you read the whole article, because it sounds like he is describing some problems with pingbacks and the opportunity for an even better linkback technology.
Mon, Feb 11 Update: Byrne explains that I was mistaken and that Trackback does have an autodiscover mechanism. Long before getting involved in WordPress someone explained it to me that those are the reason you see a special URL in Movable Type blogs was so you could copy and paste it and use it to link your article to that article’s comments, and I never questioned it.
This discussion leads me to the conclusion that there is no reason to include a “Trackback URL” visually in the viewers experience.
- At least when wanting a linkback from a WordPress blog when you are using blogging software that doesn’t support pingback, just add /trackback to the pretty permalink. [↩]
- Yes, I know that isn’t the past tense of ping, but it should be ;- [↩]
11 Comments
Well, if we’re really going to nit-pick on footnote #2, the phrase is “past” tense, not “pass” tense….
Corrected, thanx Brent O.
i’m not sure how you could “authenticate” a pingback, in any way that would require as much effort as a trackback, or meaningfully cut down on spam. nonetheless, they are all good points. If MT supports pingbacks, maybe we can all stop supporting trackbacks, and cut out a fair chunk of spam.
“fanatic” or “fantastic”? I personally prefer “fantastic” myself, but I leave the editorial to you.
This is fundamentally untrue. If the developer of a TrackBack client chooses not to implement TrackBack’s autodiscovery mechanism, then that is their choice.
If you have read the TrackBack specification, you will see that TrackBack has supported an auto-discovery mechanism since day one. A mechanism which if supported, would not require a user to do anything at all.
I do not like TB’s auto-discovery syntax, but I for one would *never* advocate to a developer not to implement a specification requirement because of personal preference, especially if it comes at the expense of the end user experience.
Does WordPress not support TrackBack’s autodiscovery mechanism?
Fanatic never even crossed my mind
Corrected.
Byrne, thank you for explaining that TrackBack has a discover mechanism. I don’t know if it is not implimented / broken in WordPress.
Long before getting involved in WordPress someone explained it to me that those are the reason you see a special URL in Movable Type blogs was so you could copy and paste it and use it to link your article to that article’s comments, and I never questioned it.
Is that what you meant by “the spec is so bad for example that WordPress claims it supports TrackBack, but blatantly doesn’t even implement it as written” in your article? I tried to post a similar question there, but you haven’t published it.
I’ve updated my article.
@Lloyd - Wordpress’ support of TrackBack is tricky from what I can tell. I am certain the server infrastructure supports it but no all themes follow the spec in regards to autodiscovery, resulting in clients wishing to send ping to be SOL. So “support” seems to me, but I could be wrong, theme-dependent.
This is what I have observed - some themes in WordPress make no mention of TrackBack at all. No big deal IMHO. Other themes though utilize a discovery mechanism that uses a rel=”trackback” attribute on an anchor tag encapsulating the TrackBack endpoint, like this:
Send TrackBacks to
I am sure there are other permutations, but I have not really been looking for them.
The proper mechanism is ugly and involves embedding an RDF document inside your HTML like so:
<p>My post content here.</p>
<!–
<rdf>….</rdf>
–>
Ugly - I know. But technically the only valid discovery mechanism.
Regardless of TB’s viability, we really should push to update the protocol as outlined here:
http://www.lifewiki.net/attachments/view/101/2.2
BTW - sorry for not publishing your comment… rectified.
Interesting, definitely well worth addressing!
Some history:
WordPress has never supported auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (i.e. for WP sending trackbacks). The thinking there is that WP supports Pingback which has better autodiscovery and maps more directly to the idea of “A linked B,” whereas TrackBack’s purpose is broader than that. There are circumstances where you might link but not TrackBack, or TrackBack but not link.
WordPress’ bundled themes used to contain the clunky RDF TrackBack autodiscovery block, so MT (and a handful of other tools) could autodiscover the TB URL for a WP post. In March of 2005, Matt axed those autodiscovery blocks. I brought up the issue on the wp-hackers list in July. Here is Matt’s response. I didn’t followup on it, but I probably should have, because that response didn’t really satisfy me. The “first few K” issue is easy to get around: just move the RDF block closer to the start of the document.
Mark, thanks for the insights! I laughed at “on the wp-hackers list in July” after clicking on the link, July of 2005 you mean! Before clicking the link I was wondering how I missed that discussion, but that was before I was fully involved.
You also have solved the mystery why people described it to me as something I could cut and paste if I wanted to use it.
Here is Matt’s response from Sat Jul 2 2005: