The BackPing Blog

This is header 3

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Does header 5 even exit?

The purpose of this open trackback festival is to figure out why High Desert Wanderer is having problems with the Backping URL. I suspect it's something in the code that searches for the most recent linkfest, but I can't be sure without more testing.

If you do open trackback posts and use either WordPress or Movable Type, we have some tips for making your life easier. Check out Using Linkfest Haven with WordPress or Using Linkfest Haven with Movable Type.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

But we must have a link to make it official.

Ya know, if spamming were a capital offense we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.

Fun stuff. The first ping was eaten, and then the second ping was rejected as a duplicate. So now we're going to try a message with a valid link.

What we were hoping to see here is a 404 Not Found error when we ping the Experimental Wordpress Blog. Instead, the trackback simply vanished without a trace. Now I'm adding a link and trying again.

Eat THIS, you swine!

Let me

Testing a ping to Wordpress with AKismet. Actually, I'm not completely convinced AKismet works with trackback spam...

The purpose of this article is so that Bruce can test trackbacks between Wordpress and Movable Type blogs. There are going to be several of these.

The BackPing plugin provides a single page-- the BackPing Database page-- for maintaining the database, generating mass pings to a single URL, or harvesting links. The page can be accessed using the Use BackPing DB link in the plugin list at the bottom of the Edit Entry Page or on the sidebar for the main menu page for the individual blogs. All of the blogs in an installation will use the same database (though it is possible this may change in the future).

Along the right side of the BackPing Database page is a list of all the blogs in the database in alphabetical order by name. Each blog is identified by name and followed by an number of hours in parentheses. The hours are intended to indicate the last time the blog was updated, but are not yet reliable. You can select any blog using the radio buttons. Click on a link to pop up the blog in a new window.

The left side of the page is divided into three main regions.

• The Blog Edit Form
• The List Selection Form
• The Generator

The generator is the last form on the BackPing Database page. It is not used to alter the database, but rather to simplify two tasks: manually pinging your blog and harvesting links.

Both tasks involve listing information in the LinkList box. This is a normal, multiline text box. You can either type into it directly or paste from a text editor. Each entry in the list consists of two lines of text. The first line of text must be the URL of a blog article. The second line of text must consist of a left parenthesis, an author name, a right parenthesis, and the article title. The author name is optional. So, for example, the following lines would describe my article on socialism and capitalism.

http://www.conservativecat.com/mt/archives/2004/11/111504_capitali_1.html
(Ferdy)11/15/04: Capitalism

If you don't want to include the author name, just use two parentheses.

http://www.conservativecat.com/mt/archives/2004/11/111504_capitali_1.html
()11/15/04: Capitalism

If you want to do a mass ping, then entry a trackback URL in the Target URL box and click PING. A trackback ping appears to be from each entry in the list will be sent to the specified ping. Entries for which a ping has been successfully sent will be removed from the link list.

The CHECK DATES button can be used to update the time estimates on the blogs. This is currently a slow, buggy process, but Bruce is working on it.

The PROCESS button is used for link harvesting. As with the mass ping, you enter link data into the LinkList box. In addition, however, you need to put data in the Header, Template, and Trailer boxes. Use the Builtin drop-down to select one of our pregenerated templates. When the link list is processed, it produces HTML text by applying the Template string to each list entry. Then the header is put in front and the trailer is put at the end. The resulting HTML is displayed and the trackbacks for each article in the links list are put into a text control.

This is only useful because you can put variables in the template. Each variable name starts with C<$BP> and ends with another dollar sign. The variables and their values are as follows.

• $BPpurl$: the permalink URL of the current article
• $BPburl$: the URL of the blog containing the current article
• $BPblog$: the name of the blog containing the current article
• $BPtitle$: the title of the current article
• $BPauthor$: the author of the current article

For example, the standard template for the carnival builtin is

For my tome on socialism and capitalism, the resulting raw html would look like this.

Ferdy of Conservative Cat presents 11/15/04: Capitalism.