I've had a few people ask me what trackbacks are and how to do them with a Blogger website. I've put together a little tutorial image that shows what a trackback is and how to make one with your Blogger weblog and Haloscan. Click on the image to the right for a large popup of the tutorial image.
A trackback is a ping that is sent to a website letting them know that you've referenced their entry in an entry of your own. Some websites show trackbacks with a link to your site "inline" with their entry. Diggers Realm does this and displays everyone who trackbacks under the story. Some websites just have a link for trackbacks and when you click it it pops up a window with the trackback URL for their entry and all of the websites that have trackbacked to them.
It is an accepted etiquette that when you trackback to someone you have a link to their entry in your article. It is bad form to send trackback pings to someone's blog and not provide a link to his or her story within your entry. Some view this as spam as they are allowing you to put a link to your entry on their website yet you are not reciprocating with your own. Some will just delete the trackback. Others will email you a nasty letter or leave a nasty comment on your site. Some will even ban you not allowing you to trackback to their site ever again. To avoid this make sure you link to their entry.
This all seems like jumping through hoops, but this is an easy and simple way to get your blog up and running with trackbacks for free and not requiring a hosting company! If your blog grows you can alway export your entries and move up to some of the other blogging options like Wordpress or Moveable Type that have features like automatic trackback that look up any blog entries you reference and automatically ping them for you, provide better comment controls and other nice features.
Thanks to Julia's Java Joint for allowing me to use her website for demonstration purposes. Go check out her blog if you haven't already.
Update: January 10, 2005
Well I'm glad I could help at least one person. Amy over at Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog has gotten trackbacks up and working on her site! Here's a trackback just for you Amy!
I think it will be a help. The problem with the haloscan tutorial is that it says NOTHING about the traditional use of trackback. I must have sent pings to about 10 different sites before one of our mutual friends (very gently) let me know how to use it. If he hadn't, I might have gotten an unpleasant surprise indeed.
Hi Digger,
thanx for the info. I only encountered one inconvenience with Haloscan so far. I used to have my blogger set that whenever a comment is posted, it goes to me first (via email), and I decide whether i want to have it up or not. Now that I installed Haloscan, I have to go to my account on their website to do that (and i dont even know IF I have any new comments).
Is there any way of making haloscan email me that I have new comments or set it somehow up in my blogger that it works nice and dandy as before ?
Now, the comments dont even appear in my blogger post section overview as they used to...
If this is not possible is there a way of keeping my old blogger commenting style and just add a third party trackback system? (why blogger doesnt have one anyway???)
I'm not really an expert on all of the ins and outs of blogger and Haloscan so you'll probably have to search through Google or the FAQs at Blogger and Haloscan to find what you are looking for.
If I knew off the top of my head I'd help you out.
