Geeklog Forums

Inspired by the totally cool reversible.org, I've got rudimentary Trackback support working in Geeklog. I was going to just support the standalone CGI from MoveableType but I wanted more control from within the GL interface so I did it in PHP, utilizing as many of the standard lib-database and lib-common functions as I could.

I'm thinking this feature ultimately would work best if incorporated directly into the article submission/viewing pages (like adding images is done in the default setup) so I'm wondering if people thing this would be better done via a patch or a full plugin? I'm guessing a plugin would simply display a block on the article.php page and allow pinging and rss listing of trackback data? I'm using 1 additional table (which, for late-night-hacking purposes, is defined in the normal table list.

Looking for suggestions to polish this off before I release it... right now the only interface is the POST commandline from perl's LWP module although I have hacked together a backtrack url list directly into the article page.

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Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

It looks like Trackball pings servers and reversible does reverse links back to those sites who link to yours. Now, what exactly are you doing? It's not clear to me looking at your post and your site.

I added the ability for sites to send trackback pings to geeklog posts. So if someone on another weblog writes an article referencing yours they simply send a trackback ping (which is supported by quite a few systems). What I'm looking for are some suggestions for an interface on the geeklog side to also send those pings. Sorry for the confusion re: reversible.org, it was just the inspiration.---Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

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Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

Let me see if I understand how Trackball works: When someone else refers to one of your stories or whatever on their site, they'll use a special URL. Trackball will then send a ping to your site which you can pick up with some detection software. How often are these pings sent? Every time someone views the article on the other person's site? It appears people don't have to access the actual link to your story in the other person's writeup for this ping to be sent. Am I close? As far as an interface, I recommend you make it into a plugin rather than a hack. This would make it easier for those using your addon to upgrade their core Geeklog. Plugins though take a little bit more work on your part. The Universal plugin kit isn't that bad to use. I screwed around with it for a day trying to get it work the first time. This was only because the instructions didn't quite cover everything I had to change. Once I got the plugin shell working though, adding my code wasn't hard. It's kind of neat how it allows you to add and remove features without touching the core software. After it's up and working, who knows maybee the core developers will like it and integrate it into one of their baselines.

Its Trackback, not Trackball (hmm... centipede plugin :-)...) You're very close, if not dead on. Weblogs use trackback as a method for people to add comments to a post on their own weblog rather than on your site. People have come up with lots of other uses as well, see http://moveabletype.org/trackback/ for details. I'm using a table for the references right now (gl_trackback) but since trackbacks are usually unmoderated I might use XML files to prevent strain on the mysql backend should someone decide to 'trackback spam' a site. I'm leaning towards plugin now as well, although I may make the underlying functionality into a PEAR class as well. I don't see this becoming part of the base distro since geeklog is used for a variety of purposes and not just as a personal weblog.---Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

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Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

Sorry, I'm not sure why I kept calling it Trackball. Okay, Trackback....Trackback...Trackback. lol Sounds like an interesting concept. I'll check out the site you mentioned.

Lazyweb is another cool use for Trackback...

Do you have an idea that you think others might be able to solve?
Make a LazyWeb request by writing it on your own blog, and then sending a Trackback ping to LazyWeb.

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Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

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Lucas Thompson, sardu@mac,com

I'm considering moving to GL from a blogging system that has trackback built in. I see this conversation was in February...did anyone ever develop Trackback support for GL any further?

Doesn't look like it Would be cool if someone did though as it sounds like an interesting and useful feature and many weblog systems make use of it now. The only thing I'm a bit worried about is the spam issue. I've heard that Movable Type had problems with spam in the comments to the extent that MT users had to disable them ... not sure if this has anything to do with Trackback though and if the problem has been fixed by now.