It’s been a while since I last made a “gosh, isn’t my typeface pretty; here are some magazines I like to read; how do I improve my printing press?” post, and I imagine that my three readers are all crying out for one – so here you go…
I’m probably the last person in the world to discover Fafblog, but just in case I’m not then you should read it. Religiously. While standing on one leg. And eating pie.
Ditto (except for the standing on one leg and eating pie) for Damian Counsell’s PooterGeek, which is not only politically astute, but also viciously funny about his ‘friends’.
Ryan Beatniksalad is off to South America for six months in about 12 hours time – but he has a new travel blog created to record his trip, and presumably also to wind up the pro-war ‘left’. Which is good.
Finally, if anyone knows how to do trackback pings without the associated content management software, then I’d be grateful if they could point me towards a sensible explanation.
Proud to be one of the three! I only realized that when I noticed the 3 subscribers on Bloglines. Which probably isn’t the only way you get read. I sure hope somebody else is reading my RSS on my blog, not just me!:S
I already knew about Fafblog, I’ll check up on the other two.
And trackbacks, while looking nice, I don’t have a clue about them. I understand it to a point. And what I’ve read reads like mud, so I’m obviously not in the frame of mind to be reading about them, and haven’t been.
Trackback — why bother? It is a silly system.
But basically you just to a request to the "trackback URL" of the item. From the Movable Type source code (if you value your sanity, don’t look at this, BTW) seems to also use the additional parameters title, excerpt, url and blog_name, which I assume are self-explanatory. It seems to let you do a trackback with either GET or POST, but they were too dopey to get the semantics right for GET….
Basically I think TB is silly because it’s edge-triggered and not idempotent. The right way to do this is with a bit database like the Technorati one (though ideally more reliable…). Another way to do it would be to have a <link rel="…> to indicate that you’re referring to another weblog post, and then have a database which searched those. At a minimum the people who implement TB should at least try to make their scripts drop duplicate submissions….