Aug
22
2003
Pingback? Trackback? Over-Engineering?

I’m about to enter risky territory here, criticizing something I don’t fully understand, but here goes… A lot of the hipper webloggers use something called “Trackback” or “Pingback”. What these allow is for someone to link to your weblog, and have a link to THEIR weblog automatically appear on YOUR site. Follow that? This allows for an interesting form which is neither really one way nor two way communication… Zen thoughts aside, I always thought it would be a nifty thing to enable on my site.

First, I investigated “Trackback”. This, apparently, is a “Movable Type“-only thing, so scratch that, since I don’t run a Movable Type weblog.

So, I investigated “PingBack”. This, apparently is some kind of standard. But, to implement it involves the use of special HTTP headers, XHTML headers, knowledge of XMLRPC, and according to the spec, familiarity with regular expressions.

Huh?

What am I missing here? Why is this so complicated? It strikes me that all you REALLY need to do is this:

1.) write a script, in the web application server of your choice, that takes as a query string parameter a unique ID for a post. Provide this to those who want to link to your post. This script should do the following:
1a.) Display the post
1b.) Run a bit of code that checks the referer URL from the HTTP request. It should compare that to a list stored in a database or text file. If the referer is not in that list, add it, preferably with the time of the request.

Then, when you display your post, display this list of referers. Granted, this lacks a certain amount of flexibility, and may be open to some degree of abuse, but heck, it does what you want, no? I’m really curious if there are any Pingbacking or Trackbacking bloggers out there who think I’m a genius, an idiot, or somewhere in between, based on these thoughts. Until I implement “SomethingBack”-ing, you can contact me here.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2003 at 4:41 pm and is filed under The Internet Biz, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Pingback? Trackback? Over-Engineering?”

Leave a Reply

Related Posts: