Trackbacks – Another Tech Tip about Blogging
-> After you read this (or before if you don’t care about trackbacks), make sure you keep scrolling down to the last post to see the cool graph that Joe posted.
My favorite thing about blogging is the conversation and I’m always trying to think of new ways to get everybody talking and see what everybody else has to say. I thought I’d post a bit of info on trackbacks which can help people follow a conversation around our blogworld.
When you talk about somebody else in a general way, it’s fun to include a link to their blog; this is a link a reader can follow but provides neither a trackback or a ping. If you are referencing something another blogger said in a specific post, it’s helpful to make your link a trackback to that post which causes two things to happen:
- It posts a small portion of your blog post around and including the text with the link in the comments section of the other person’s post.
- It sends the other blogger an e-mail saying that you referenced their post. I think this is the ping part but somebody else can correct me if I have the vocabulary wrong.
To find the trackback URL for their post, I go to their blog and click on the specific post that I am referencing (this brings it up so you can see all the comments) and the URL that is in your browser heading is the trackback URL. It will look like the regular url with the specific blog reference (such as teacherkathrynj) but it will also have something like /p=5 or /post-title-with-dashes or something else. That is what you need to copy as a link to make the trackback happen.
Anyway, it’s a nice way to make sure that the conversations that move around our blogworld have some connections. You can e-mail me if something about this isn’t clear or log in and correct it – our class blog is kind of like a wiki that way.
Here’s a link to a comic strip about blogging which Joe posted on his blog but kind of fits with this post about me and my blogging fixation.
