Problem With Trackback

Uncategorized

Today I was cleaning up some of the trackback code for WordPress when a number of things struck me about Trackback, which I’m sure someone has thought of before but I’m surprised they haven’t been addressed in the specification.

First off, what is trackback? On movabletype.org there is a Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack that is pretty thorough. Interestingly though they mention the names of several “tools” that have implemented TrackBack (as <strong> no less) they don’t link to any of them. If you’re not familiar with Trackback go read the first section of that to get up to speed.

A commonly requested feature is the ability to send a trackback ping when editing an entry. This has been especially needed since we’ve implemented post status flags (so you can, for example, save your post as a draft and work on it later). There are a couple of logical steps to implementing this, the first of which being that we need to track what pings have and haven’t been sent yet. Then the posting code had to modified a bit to only send trackback pings when an entry was published, and to not ping a URI that had been pinged before, et cetera. Not terribly hard stuff, just a bit of code to go through and some testing to make sure everything worked right.

Now that we have a nice record of pings that have been sent, I thought it would be nice to add that data to the default template for WordPress, as Trackback suffers from the same one-way linking problem it was trying to solve. That is, if I trackback another site my ping will show up in their comments or their trackbacks, but there’s nothing on my site indicating I sent that ping.

Then I realized that this set of pinged URIs I had was close to useless. What does a URI like http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 mean anyway? If you enter it in your browser you get an XML error back. If you append a query string to it with ?__mode=rss with some implementations you will get a RSS .91 feed of trackbacks sent from that entry, from which you could extract the actual URI of the resource that http://www.movabletype.org/mt/trackback/55 is relevant to, but what a hassle. You can sweep things like this under the rug with a convoluted “auto-discovery” functionality (which is using sloppily embedded RDF instead of <link>… why?) but these problems are easy enough to solve that they should be.

(A side note, a URI tied to a unique ID system specific to a particular software platform does very little to suggest permanence to me. Are we going to have sent ping URI link rot?)

Return of the Posting

Personal

The hiatus is over.

Peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned
If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned

The holidays could not have been better, a delightful mix of friends and family that I will remember fondly for years to come. Presents, the least important part of the holidays, were notable this year in quality and thoughtfulness. Thank you. Presence, friends I have not seen in some time have been in town, and the new place has been somewhat of a hub. I consider myself lucky and blessed to be surrounded by such great people.

Just as writing is a habit, not writing is a habit. In my quest for relaxation over the past weeks I have developed this bad habit, and now it’s time to break it.

I have been extremely busy as of late. I always say I’m busy, but now more so. I’m doing my best to catch up before school starts, and software helps, but there are still personal notes to write, 614 photos to optimize and upload, countless emails to respond to, clients to work with, and incidentals like eating and sleeping.

Most importantly, I turn 20 in 5 days.

Nick Denton: Blog Maven / Thief

Design

Every once in a while someone you hear a story that makes your blood boil. Sometimes it happens to someone you know. Joe Clark has the complete details, but here’s a rundown of the events as I understand them:

  1. Noel Jackson redesigns Fleshbot using CSS and XHTML, all in perfectly compliant code. I talked with him for a bit of this, sent some screenshots. He worked really hard on it and the result was, if I may say so, gorgeous despite the questionable content.
  2. Joe contacts Nick Denton on behalf of Noel saying what a neat thing Noel had done and recommending they hire him. Joe can be a nice guy like that.
  3. Denton responds that they can’t really afford anything like that right now.
  4. Noel’s design shows up on Fleshbot, a few days later they remembered to credit him for it.
  5. Later Noel’s exact code, right down to an empty div he had to add to get the layout to work just right, shows up on Gawker and Gizmodo. Some colors are changed, and likely due to incompetence of the implementor the other new designs have numerous mistakes added.
  6. Noel steams quietly for a few days, then talks to Nick Denton. Denton doesn’t see what the big deal was using Noel’s copyrighted work on several other sites. It reminds me of people who rip off other’s designs and then don’t understand why you’re mad about it. The copies are not as high quality as the original, as well.

Smells rotten to me. Personally I was quite fond of Gizmodo, as it really is a high quality blog, but I’m not going to visit it anymore and I’ve delinked it because I don’t want to support a company with such low ethical standards. I encourage you to consider the situation and come to your own conclusions. All I can do at this point to support Noel at this point is let more people know about what’s happened to him, in the hope that possibly this could end on a more positive note.

Update: Denton has emailed me and is telling everyone that he has posted chat transcripts that clear everything up. I applaud him for putting more information out there, but it doesn’t seem to help his case much. I suppose anyone can claim ignorance as the reason for a mistake. Some will believe that, some won’t. What makes the difference is actions from here on out, now that everything is “clear.”

Happy Birthday Sarah

Personal

Before it’s too late, I wanted to wish the wonderful Sarah Michele Williams who plays trumpet a happy 18th birthday.

Birthday Wish

On your Birthday,
Stretch for a sunbeam…
Reach for a star,
Go for a beautiful dream…

Pick out some wishes,
no matter how far,
or how hard to reach
they may seem…

Cherish some hopes
that are dear to your heart…

And as a new year comes in view,

Treasure & keep them,
and know from the start,
that this year,
you can make them come true

I hope your birthday was as special as every day deserves to be for you.

Distributed Social Networking Software

Design,

One of the greatest things about South by Southwest interactive last year, which I just barely made it to, was the incredible creative energy born of like-minded people interacting with each other closely. Out of a conversation with Tantek Çelik regarding linking, social interaction, and leveraging HTML rather fabricating new formats I became involved in what now is known as XFN, or the XHTML Friends Network.

XFN is a standardized method for leveraging the HTML rel attribute to describe relationships between people. More simply, it’s about enhancing how you link to somebody. Together with Tantek and Eric Meyer (and wonderful feedback) we’ve put together some great information and guidelines for using XFN. Check it out and share the link.

As an example of an early XFN application, people who I’ve met in person now automatically have a star beside their name when I link to them. See the “timely dozen” to your right or my portal page.