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How to Trackback using Haloscan (if you're lucky)

[P.S. - I'm putting the PS first as a warning - apparently I have done it wrong and will probably need to re-install the previous template as Haloscan removes all previous comments and the dofollow tweak. So don't do what I did]

After my previous post I received a comment from Andy Beard recommending that I start trackbacking. So, being the adventurous sort, I thought "hmmm maybe I'll go to sleep instead" but I didn't! I read up a load of stuff which confused me even further about trackbacks, apparently Blogger is not particularly trackback friendly, Wordpress is better they say, then I zoomed over to Haloscan and did what they said using their 'wizard' (ezpz) and now I see 'trackback' proudly displayed at the bottom of my posts (hooray). [Not any more - I have reverted back to the none trackback version. An interesting two hours nevertheless !]

So now it's there what does it do? Or what do I do? Well, I stared at it for a while and then decided to try and trackback someone, or something, following the instructions I found buried in the Haloscan forum. The person I have chosen for my experiment is Paula Mooney (no doubt she will be delighted) for the reason that she left a comment on one of my posts a while back and she seems a nice person :-).

So I'm going to follow the instructions and find out if anything happens.

(10 minutes later)

Well, needless to say, that didn't work. Haloscan gave me an error message, it seems the URL was all wrong, so as I can't find a trackback URL at Paula's place, I'll give Courtney Tuttle a whirl, 'cause I know he has a trackback URL.

(10 minutes later)

- and noticed that the trackback URI was the same link with /trackback tagged on the end so I used that and, lo and behold, much to my amazement, eureka! I got the 'success!' message (well done me) - so what was wrong with Paula Mooney's and Mr Tuttle's links ? I don't know, maybe it was me?

So now I have sent my first trackback and I feel much better for it. I highly recommend the experience! I don't know what good it will do but Andy Beard recommended it to me, so on his beard be it!

I suspect he will soon notice my trackback, as I think that's half the idea of the whole thing.

4 comments:

Andy on GreasemonkeyJun 18, 2007 04:09 PM
Great to see you have things reverted.

On the receiving end, blogger doesn't use trackbacks by defult, but linkbacks, which relies on Google's blogsearch to see your links.

That is why a trackback on Paula doesn't work, but a linkback should... eventually be picked up.

With trackback, if you don' have a link to the post, within your own post, there is a high chance that a trackback spam plugin will decide that your trackback is spam.

Thus you should link to a parmalink for a post, and use a trackback URL for the trackback itself.

Rather than using haloscan for trackbacks, there is a much better option using Greasemonkey in Firefox that I wrote about recently.
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Paula Neal MooneyJun 18, 2007 09:11 PM
Hmm...I don't know what happened, but thanks for trying.

Paula
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The Old VicJun 19, 2007 02:47 AM
Andy, thanks for all the help. It must be great to know what you're doing. I'll have another look at your post on Greasemonkey, I thought I needed Haloscan AND Greasemonkey. I'll also give those linkbacks a go.
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The Old VicJun 19, 2007 02:49 AM
Hi Paula, apparently I should be doing linkbacks to your site not trackbacks, so I'll have another go later. I never knew blogging could be so much fun!
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