Thursday, August 11, 2005

Technical problems today

In response to Steven Taylor's post on the Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging, along with chiding from both Erik Marshall and Paladin, I tried to set up trackbacks on my blog. The truth is, I still have no idea what they do, nor why they would be useful.

So far, so bad. All they've done is muck up my fonts ... and as a textual scholar, my fonts are VERY important to me! Anyway, I'll be dealing with those technical troubles today, so my apologies if the page seems more user-hostile than friendly.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:06 AM

    I don't remember any chiding :)

    Trackbacks are kinda hard to implement and cumbersome to use on blogger, but they rock for inter-blog conversations.

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  2. Trackbacks use a special URL. This post has a trackback URL.

    If I respond to your post on my blog, I'd copy the Special Trackback URL into a special field on my blog post (in most blogging systems).

    The trackback url is meant for servers, really.

    Then, when I published/posted my blog entry, MY server sees the trackback URL and it digitally pokes YOUR server, sending along the regular human URL of MY post. Your blog then puts a little note to the effect that I posted a response to your post, with a link.

    Nice idea, maybe, but not so smart on the fact of it--trackbacks are really really easy to exploit for spamming. And they're a nuisance requiring more labor than they're worth.

    Much better to rely on looking at your logs.

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  3. It looks like you have the Haloscan comments and the blogger ones side by side and it looks like you have the code possibly in the wrong place.

    BTW--are you going to be at convocation on Monday?

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  4. Steven,

    The Monday convocation is mandatory, right? I guess I'll be there.

    Scott

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