This is body text.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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.
]]>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 articleFor 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.
]]>To change the currently-selected list, choose a different list in the drop-down box and click the CHANGE LIST button.
You can create a new list by clicking on the Create new list link in the form. This takes you to a new page where you can enter the name for your new list and select via checkboxes the blogs to include in the new list. The list creation form is very crude, and there is currently no way to delete a list. Bruce is working on it.
]]>The form contains the following fields.
The Method, Pattern, and Replacement controls all interact to convert an article URL to a trackback URL.
]]> If the method iscomputed, 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
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.