Columbus Blogs is coordinating a get-together for (obviously) Columbus bloggers! Join us on Wednesday, November 30 at 7:30. See here for additional details.
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Trackbacks were developed as a way to connect blogs and promote communication. Your blog sends a trackback to my blog. My readers see the link to your blog on one of my posts that interests them. They might be interested in your opinion on whatever it was that I was writing about, so they can click through and read your blog. The end result is that more people are exposed to more blogs, and hopefully more information and more points of view. Trackbacks help make the web a web.
Unfortunately, trackbacks are easily faked, and indeed are currently being used to try to stuff spam into blog comments. So pingbacks were developed, to try to fix many of the problems with trackbacks. Pingbacks require a reciprocal link. That is, a site sending a pingback must contain a link to the ping destination. The ping recipient will connect to the ping originator and verify that this link is present.
Recently on the WordPress hackers mailing list, someone proposed a plugin that introduced trackback verification, to which Phil
retorted that it "turns trackbacks into pingbacks".
I get a lot of trackbacks and pingbacks, mostly from bloggers writing about my plugins. So far, every trackback I've received has originated from a post that included a link to me. So the proposed plugin didn't sound all that unreasonable to me. I didn't expect that it would change anything for me, or my blog, in any substantial way.
But just this afternoon I received a trackback to a post of mine. It landed in my moderation queue, because the originating blog has never sent a trackback or pingback before. Being the diligent blog owner, I clicked through from my moderation queue to see who had linked to me, and why.
I was delighted with the post that I found, and wasted no small amount of time playing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game I found linked there. But nowhere in the post was any mention of me, my blog, or my post. The ping originator had read my post about the HHGTTG movie, and decided that I would like to know about the game. Rather than send me an email, s/he sent me a trackback. A perfectly reasonable -- and useful -- application of trackbacks!
And here we find the value of non-reciprocal trackbacks. I found a cool link; and was intrigued enough to peruse the rest of the site -- something I don't often do when following links that lead to posts about my plugins, for some reason. I found a nice howto for pretty permalinks in WordPress on IIS, something I likely never would have found!
I need to remember to do this. I've been using my blog for almost two years now, and I've not yet used trackbacks in this way.
This is about the gajillionth article I've read that says that Open Source software squishes bugs faster. You know what? I don't care.
What I do care about is the fact that Open Source software includes me in the bug squishing process.
In September 2004, I filed bug #477 on the MediaWiki bugzilla. There was an initial flurry of activity about my bug, which tapered off as the weeks went on. But my bug was never abandoned; and each time someone weighed in with an opinion on my bug, I received an email about it. Even now, over a year later, I still get emails when someone adds something new. Twice I've received emails from the bug tracker alerting me that other bugs have been marked duplicates of mine, which further validates the fact that my bug report is legitimate.
As a user of the MediaWiki software, I am extremely pleased that I've been kept in the loop. I've learned a fair bit from the discussion on my bug. Even though my bug isn't officially fixed yet, I'm still more inclined to use MediaWiki than a competing package because I value the inclusion that I've received.
And the thing is, the people commenting on that bug aren't even trying to include me. They've never addressed me personally; they haven't sent me private email. But the bug tracker in use -- Bugzilla -- includes me by default, encouraging my continued participation in the bug squashing process, and encouraging me to remain involved with the larger MediaWiki community.
Compare that with most any closed source software application, where your bug reports disappear into the ether. Granted, some closed source applications do provide some follow-up to their bugs, but even these don't let the original reporter see so much of the developer conversation as what you'll find in Open Source projects.
Open Source is a great model for developers, but it's also a great model for customers.
In-Series 2.0 is now available!
This version allows for negative numbers when ordering your series, so you can now easily insert items at the beginning of your series without re-numbering all the existing entries. Note that due to an unfortunate bug in WordPress 1.5.2, you will be unable to use a zero.
In-Series 2.0 also fixes a few minor problems with the all_series() template tag.
Thanks to Drew for his assistance debugging this!
Impostercide 1.2 is now available!
Thanks to Denis de Bernardy for the motivation to properly deal with multiple accounts using the same email address. For those people using different login names but the same registered email address, you must "sign" your comment using the login name with which you are currently logged in.
Impostercide also now checks all three comment fields (name, email address, and URI) when someone comments to prevent as many spoofing attempts as possible.