TrackbackYesterday someone asked me what a Trackback was, how it works, and then after explaining, asked me how to do a trackback in Blogger. I understand that some blogging terms are apparently not very easy to understand, especially for the not-so-IT-savvy.

Let me clarify. Well. To put it simply, A trackback or pingback is a “remote comment”!

It would be clear with an example… For example, Mary has a blog and one day she posts about her new spaghetti recipe. Then, a day later, Amy (the spaghetti lover) was searching on the net for new spaghetti recipes and she found Mary’s post! Immediately, she tried out the recipe and cooked a brilliant meal for herself and her family. Amy writes a post in her blog about Mary’s recipe and sends a trackback to Mary’s post permalink. Now, when this happens, Amy’s post will appear as one of the comments under Mary’s post!

As simple as that! Of course, some blogs differentiate trackbacks and comments, some don’t.

WordPress Trackbacks

In WordPress, the default setting is that whenever you post any link, WordPress will automatically check if they are blog posts and if they are, send a trackback. Apart from that, WordPress also has a trackback field to specify trackbacks to send to.

You can change this setting in your WordPress admin panel. Go to Options -> Discussion. The setting is “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)”

Blogger Trackbacks

The interesting thing is that blogger does not support this feature! I didn’t know that (while I was still using my blogger blog, I still haven’t learnt about trackbacks)

I’ve searched the net and I came across this useful alternative to send trackbacks in blogger. Does it work? I’m not sure yet.

The solution requires you to use an extension in Firefox by the name of GreaseMonkey, plus a userscript (a piece of Javascript essentially) to add functionality to Blogger.

Another one I bumped across is Haloscan, which seems to me like a better and faster solution.

HaloScan provides a free, easy to use commenting and trackback service for weblogs and websites, allowing visitors to leave feedback, share their opinion, or comment on the subject at hand.

Has anybody tried any of these solutions? Let me know of they are good! :)