| XML
About
Home
RSS
OPML
XML-RPC
SOAP
|
|
 |
|
Trackback in the UserLand environment
Previous topic
|
Next topic
|
|
 Trackback in the UserLand environment
started 4/25/2003; 5:23:31 PM - last post 7/21/2003; 10:47:06 PM
|
|
Dave Winer - Trackback in the UserLand environment 
4/25/2003; 5:23:31 PM (reads: 85138, responses: 1)
|
|
Status 
This document explains how Trackback will work in UserLand content management software.
At first I'm implementing it in Manila, but the code is being developed modularly, with a core at system.verbs.apps.trackback, so most of the code will be shared between Radio and Manila. The main difference is the format of a table for a weblog post, they're different in the two products.
Outbound Trackback is easy for both products, inbound will be hard for Radio, where the content system may be behind a firewall. Some kind of proxy will be needed, perhaps a Manila site.
As of this writing, 4/25/03, only outbound Trackback works in Manila. The software described here has not been released yet.
What is Trackback?
Trackback is a set of specifications published by SixApart, the company that develops Movable Type.
If a content management application supports outbound Trackback, as Manila does, it can notify another site that a post points to a post on the other site. You may see a list of inbound Trackbacks in a separate window linked to the post.
Here's an example of a Trackback page on Mitch Kapor's weblog. Each of the pages listed comments on Mitch's post, links to it, and has notified his site. A notification is also often called a ping.
How Outbound Trackback works
In Manila, Outbound Trackback only works for News Item oriented sites. When you post a News Item to the home page of the site, if Trackback is turned on (by default it's not) we scan the message text for URLs, and then read each of the pages. If we find a RDF snippet for auto-discovery of Trackback, we extract the information, and record it in the table for the post. Here's an example of a RDF snippet.
If the Automatic Pings pref is turned on, we then ping the site, without any user interaction. All this happens in a separate thread running in the background, so the user does not have to wait for the pinging to take place before continuing. If Automatic Pings is not turned on, we just do the auto-discovery work, and later, the user, when editing the message, may choose to ping sites that are linked to, on a case by case basis.
We've tested the implementation against sites that use both the old and the new format for Trackback. Late last year, the Trotts changed the spec substantially. There are still some old sites that require GETs for pings instead of the newer POST. For those sites, apparently, the format of the RDF for discovery is different too. We've also tested against the newest implementations running at SixApart, and servers with the current released software. They all work. The only cases where outbound Trackback doesn't work is where the RDF bits are not embedded in the HTML source. Since we do automatic Trackback and think that for most users that's the only reasonable way to do outbound Trackback, we require it, and will not work with sites that don't have the discovery RDF. Apparently it's quite easy to get the RDF into the templates in Movable Type.
Specifications
Benjamin and Mena Trott: Trackback Specification.
Justin Klubnik, Benjamin and Mena Trott: TrackBack Module for RSS.
|
|
Chris Brody - Re: Trackback in the UserLand environment
7/21/2003; 10:47:06 PM (reads: 41065, responses: 0)
|
|
|
I've been testing the Radio implementation - great stuff! That is, once I got it to work after several reinstalls and a root update.
I have two requests: a field for manual trackback URL entries, and notification via the events log of successful pings. I'm sure this is being worked on as I speak...
(I've posted this to Jake's blog too.)
|
|
|
|
