The blog edit form is used to add, delete, or update blog information in the database. The edit form is at the top of the BackPing Database page. To use the form, you must first select a blog using the radio buttons in the blog list on the right side of the page. Select New Entry to create a new blog entry, or select an existing blog entry to edit or delete it. Each time you select a blog using the radio buttons, the blog edit form is updated with that blog's data. When you select New Entry, the blog edit form is lanked. Therefore, it's very important to click a radio button BEFORE trying to change anything in the blog edit form.
The form contains the following fields.
- Blog URL
- URL of the blog. This should point to the blog's main page. It's important that the format of the URL match the way blog permalinks are rendered. If a blog is at http://www.myblog.com, but its article permalinks look like http://myblog.typepad.com/archives/2006/12/mypost.html, then you must use http://myblog.typepad.com as the URL.
- Blog Name
- The name of the blog.
- Method
- The method used to compute a trackback URL. The allowable methods are C
, C , C , C , C , and C . - In Current List
- A checkbox indicating whether or not the selected box is in the list currently selected on the List Selection Form.
- Pattern
- The pattern used to find trackback information.
- Replacement
- The replacement string used to convert the results of the pattern match to a trackback URL. The replacement string absolutely must be enclosed in double quotes. This is for security reasons.
- STORE
- Use this button to save your changes. If you are creating a new blog entry, then it will be inserted. If you are viewing an existing entry, it will be updated.
- DELETE
- Use this button to delete a blog from the database.
The Method, Pattern, and Replacement controls all interact to convert an article URL to a trackback URL.
If the method is computed, then the trackback URL is computed from the article URL. The Pattern is a PERL regular expression that is matched against the article URL, and the replacement string is evaluated to compute the trackback URL. For example, a common pattern/replacement pair is
- p=(\d+)
- "http://www.myblog.com/wp-trackback.php?p=$1"
The simplest method is C The The Some blogs use a stealth trackback in order to discourage spam. The trackback URL scraped from the page would be something like Some blogs try to cut down on spam by not having an RDF header at all. If these blogs cannot be processed by any of the other methods, then you must specify a method of Finally, if a blog does not support trackbacks, the method should be /trackback/ to the end of the article URL.
\d+ expression matches a sequence of digits. The parentheses around it tell PERL to store the matched text into the variable $1. This value replaces $1 when the replacement string is evaluated. So, this particular pattern/replacement pair converts http://www.myblog.com?p=1234 to
http://www.myblog.com/wp-trackback.php?p=1234.scrape method is similar to computed, except that the URL plugged into the pattern match is not the URL of the article, but the trackback URL stored in the RDF information on the target page. Sometimes the scraped URL is all you need, in which case the pattern and replacement would be
http://www.myblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1234, but the actual trackback URL is something different, like http://www.myblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-die-spammers.cgi/1234. In that case, you need a more complicated pattern.
read. The pattern and replacement work exactly as in scrape, but the pattern is matched against the first 16K of the entire web page instead of the trackback URL in the RDF header.disabled.