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Monday, October 06, 2003
How to Use this Site
If you've seen other blogs before, this site will seem pretty familiar. While it is slightly different from most blogs in being a 'multi-author' blog, most of the layout is fairly standard... Continue reading "How to Use this Site"
Posted by Scott Leslie at 07:25 AM in About this ETUG Blogtalk | Permalink
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Comments
What is the 'Trackback URL' for? I don't see that explained in 'How To Use This Site'.
Thanks,
Kate
Posted by: Kate Britt at October 10, 2003 09:02 AM
Kate, great question! We purposely avoided that one in the intro piece but maybe now's the time to explore it.
Trackback is an innovation introduced by the people who developed the software running this site, Typepad (who also developed another popular package named MoveableType) which has now spread to other blog writing software.
As they describe on the MoveableType site, it's purpose is to
"provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, 'This is something you may be interested in.' To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B."
We haven't had a whole lot of uses for Trackback so far, because as far as we know the majority of ETUG folks interacting with the site are doing so just through their web browsers and are not running their own blogs. Trackback is a way for writers producing their own sites to automatically interconnect that material with material on other sites.
We had one attempted trackback ping from the folks at the Sidebars blog at BCIT. Dave Smulders wrote a post about this discussion when it first started, and tried to send a trackback ping to this blog as a way of notifying us that he was posting on the topic, and interlinking his material into this one. For some reason it seemed not to have worked for Dave, but it was exactly the type of use that was meant for it.
As an illustration, I've created a trackback ping to my earlier post on a matrix of uses for blogs in education. If you follow that link and scroll down, what you'll see is an excerpt of a post on my personal blog site that sent a ping to this post so as to say 'hey, you might be interested to know I'm commenting on what you just posted'.
Does this help? Please let me know - trackback sometimes seems confusing at first as it is essentially letting people place links back to their site on your site without asking, which is not necessarily a typical way the web works. (The remedy for abuse is that you do have control over deleting/not accepting trackback pings to your site)
Finally, a few educators have posted some thoughts on educational uses for trackback that might be of interest.
Posted by: Scott Leslie at October 10, 2003 09:51 AM
Thanks, Scott. I think I get it. At this time the feature is only available with a few of the blog apps I guess? I just tried to use it on my own site's experimental blog (uses Blogger) and it created a link that produced an error page.
See here to view the post with the Trackback link in it.
Posted by: Kate Britt at October 10, 2003 12:17 PM
Kate you are absoutely right that currently Trackback is supported on only 'some' blogging applications, not all. That said, it is possible to build a standalone trackback form for a website - the documents at the MoveableType site decribe how. This would mean that someone who is not running a trackback enabled blog could still manually send a trackback ping by clicking on the form and manually entering the details of the posting from which they want to 'send' the trackback ping.
Using this method, people have implemented manual trackbacks in things like the internet topic exchange and as a way to add context to the re-use of learning objects in repositories like the Maricopa Learning Exchanges implementation of RSS and Trackback
Posted by: Scott Leslie at October 10, 2003 12:38 PM