Trackback is Working Now
Mar 28th, 2007 by Alex
I was reading someone’s blog today. I’m told to keep that someone on the DL, so I won’t even say whose. You know it doesn’t matter. It is completely irrelevant whose blog it was.
I saw a trackback link on the blog.
It triggered me. I couldn’t recall receiving any pings under WordPress, despite having the “Allow Pings” option checked by default on each post. I do remember receiving them when I was using Movable Type.
So instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour I decided to deprive myself of some of my much-needed beauty rest and investigate the matter. It turns out that the older MistyLook theme doesn’t specify a trackback URL. I speaketh PHP — and the newer version that does support TB doesn’t implement it all that well in my opinion — so after two very small code insertions I now have trackback and comment RSS links on each post and on the index pages.
Of course, this may may a futile exercise, but it is nice to know if/when people are referencing you. Granted there’s always Google’s “site:” search or checking Technorati, but there’s a lot of small blogs out there that aren’t indexed or choose not to be.
It’s strange. Based on a small sampling of themes that I looked at tonight, it seems that the theme authors don’t favor trackback. Few of them include any hooks for it, despite that fact that WordPress supports it natively.
It’s on now for me. Ping away.
I just noticed this too. I’m having a hard time implementing the code though
The following PHP snippet will create a trackback line.
<?php if ($post->ping_status == "open") { ?> | <a href="<?php trackback_url(display); ?>" rel="trackback">Trackback</a> <?php } ?>You’ll probably want to place this on the Main Index template so it appears by for each new post. I also put it in the Comments template, just above the following line.
<?php if ('open' == $post-> comment_status) : ?>Good luck.
[...] Thanks to Alex for helping me out. Thanks Michelle Waters to for some great tips on how to make comments stand out. No TagsBookmark to: [...]
Thanks for your help! I just sent you a trackback but I don’t see it.
Maybe trackbacks are disabled for your post? Hmm.. I’m still fixing my blogs. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Nikki: Most new comments are held for moderation until a commenter is established. I believe this includes trackbacks as well. Your trackback was received; thanks for the link, glad it’s working for you.