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So I was looking at trackback, Movable Type‘s “Watch out, I’m talking about you” feature. And I thought… well, why? If someone is linking to me, they are likely to appear in my Referral logs. What is the point of my putting it in? Obviously, there is the Geek Cred feature of having an almost proprietary feature in my home brew weblogging software, but as far as I can tell, the extra effort I’d have to go though every post to a) find out if the blog I link to has trackback, and b) what it’s trackback URL is to do so isn’t worth my while, I might just as well store the referers and use them.

The obvious argument against this is the shear number of different referrals any blog might conceivably generate where Trackback will always be the same. For example, right now going to another site from here would generate the referrer “http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php”, whereas it could equally go from… http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=678, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=3, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=5, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?limit=10, http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?since=2002-08-01m and that’s just from links on this page! None of which, except the first one, will be current in a few months time.

Plus, to support Trackback, I must put what amounts to part of an RSS feed in each post so that Movable Type’s Bookmarklet thing can magically know what to do. I don’t object to the idea as much as… well, there has to be a better way of doing this. Comments?

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