This is header 4

This is body text.

Does header 5 even exit?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.