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
<p>$BPauthor$ of <a href="$BPburl$">$BPblog$</a> presents <a href="$BPpurl">$BPtitle$</a>.</p>
For my tome on socialism and capitalism, the resulting raw html would look like this.
<p>Ferdy of <a href="http://www.conservatvecat.com">Conservative Cat</a> presents <a href="http://www.conservativecat.com/mt/archives/2004/11/111504_capitali_1.html">11/15/04: Capitalism</a>.</p> and would look like the following when published.
Ferdy of Conservative Cat presents 11/15/04: Capitalism.