Steve Gets A Life

phantom trackbacking

so i was looking at my webserver logs today (in a fit of boredom) and discovered that someone (from cable.mindspring.com) had visited my site, coming from Christopher Allen's blog. more specifically, from his entry on privacy. i checked it out, and there i was, listed as a trackbacker.

so i've never read up too much on trackbacks, but here are a few links i just found about the subject.
now from what i understand, what should have happened is this:

1. i read Allen's entry and enjoy it
2. i decide to write about it
3. just before i hit "publish," i include Allen's trackback link into my list of URLs to 'ping'

but i didn't. instead, i skipped the last step entirely. but it seemed to not matter.

is there something doing the pinging for me? is just mentioning the URL of the blog entry in the few first lines enough? whaddahey?

---

so maybe im an idiot. i found the answer:

Auto-Discovery
A final option for using TrackBack in Movable Type is to enable TrackBack auto-discovery in your weblog configuration preferences:
When you do this, Movable Type will look for any links in your weblog post, and use auto-discovery to determine if those links are TrackBack-enabled. If they are, Movable Type will automatically send TrackBack pings to those sites. You don't need to use the URLs to Ping field, nor do you need to use the bookmarklet to select TrackBack-enabled posts.

but then i checked. and that checkbox wasn't checked <gasp!>

Posted by Steve on April 30, 2004 03:58 PM