Web Cash

You know your site is finally getting around a bit when you start getting comments. Spam comments.

I started a (now defunct) website last year, powered by Wordpress. It never got too popular, and in the beginning I was excited every time I got a “New Comment” or “New Trackback” e-mail. Then I realized they were mostly all spam.
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Don’t know what a trackback is? Check out this set of articles for a bit more information.

Assuming you do know what a trackback is, how do you send one - technically speaking? And how can we write a php script to send one?

A trackback is a simple ping - an HTTP Request. It is specially formatted with a limited amount of information. The receiving server is set up to handle that information and use it to create the comment based on your trackback ping.
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The topic for today is trackbacks. What are they? What do they do? How do I use one?

Trackbacks are strange things. Blogs all over the internet have them enabled, but I’d bet a lot of the blog owners don’t have a clue what they are.

Here’s the short version. Trackbacks are citation systems for blogs. Trackbacks are also a system for remote commenting.

That’s how they’re typically explained, but that doesn’t help a whole lot, now does it?

So here are a few questions answered to get you started on understanding the trackback.

• What is a trackback and what does it do?
• Do all blogs support trackbacks?
• How can I create a trackback
• Why would I want to create a trackback?

I just created the “Online Tools” page section, and added the first tool to the list.

What is it? It’s a form that let’s you send a trackback to a blog from any website. It might sound silly, but trust me… it’s not.
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This is a collection of scripts and online tools that I’ve written. They’ve helped me in the past as a web designer and internet author, so chances are they might help you.

Browse through and use what you need. If you have an idea for a new kind of tool that you need, and I could build, leave a comment. Maybe I’ll put it on my to-do list.

Submit Trackbacks with a Form

Trackbacks are great, but not all blogging platforms and websites support them. Solution? Submit them from a third-party form - like the trackback-via-form tool I wrote.

You provide all the necessary information - the trackback URI and your webpage’s information - and the script sends the trackback to your target. Pretty nifty tool for publicizing websites that don’t have built in support for trackbacks.

Text Cleaner Tool: Remove Newline Characters

This is a simple tool that can come in handy for uploading articles to your own site or to article directories. If you used hard line-breaks to format the article for print or for e-mail, you’ll need to get rid of those new-lines. Just copy and paste into the form, and those newline characters will be a thing of the past.

You can access the Text Cleaner Form here.

Form to Encode Sample HTML for Display

If you want to display sample HTML for the user to see, you need to jump through a few hurdles. With this tool, you can copy and paste HTML into the textarea, hit submit, and get text that has all of the special characters escaped for you.

Copy and paste that on to your page, and it should appear as a perfect snippet of sample markup. Check out the HTML encoding form here.

So you want to submit a trackback, but you’re website or blogging platform doesn’t support it? No problem!

Fill out the form below, and we’ll do the trackbacking for you.The Trackback URI comes from the website you’re sending the ping to. The other sections are pretty self-explanatory - describe the post you’re trackbacking from.

If you want to test it out, trackback to this page and watch the magic work. You should get a response if it works, or an error message if something goes wrong.

Trackbacks are a great way to publicize your blog or website. They allow you to ping a person’s blog, say “Hey, I’m talking about you!” and leave a message.

These trackback pings will show up in the target post’s comment section, and sometimes the author will separate trackbacks out to show at the beginning of the list. Although they won’t always get you search engine ju-ju, thanks to rel=nofollow, they are a great way to get people to come to your website.

Why Trackback If the Search Engine Doesn’t Care?

I know that every time I get a trackback to one of my websites, I immediately check out the source. To some extent I want to check for spam, but I’m also concerned with, “Who’s this new guy talking to me?”

When I’m viewing another person’s blog, I also usually follow the trackbacks if I was interested in the original post. I rarely click on the typical name-link included in a comment, though.

The trackback signals to both the target website’s author and to its readers that this comment has something worth while for them to read. So often they’ll click the link and see what you have to say.

Ok, How Do I Send a Trackback?

Well, if you’re using a standard blogging platform like Wordpress, it’s pretty easy. At the bottom of your post editing screen, you’ll probably see a space to enter a trackback URI. This is the link from the original website that you send the trackback ping to.

Just enter the URI in your editor, and you’re all set. The problem, though, is that not every blogging platform supports sending trackbacks. You might also want to send a trackback from a non-blog website, if you’ve added some content that speaks to the original post.

Enter the trackback-via-form tool. This form will do all the work for you. Enter the necessary information (Trackback URI, your page’s title, your page’s URL, an excerpt of your page, and your blog name), and hit submit.

You should see a response with either an “All clear! Trackback was sent successfully.” or some kind of error message.

Enjoy, and good luck trackbacking. Test it out by sending a trackback to this page or the form’s page.

If you’re done with the trackback form, why don’t you go back and browse through some other online tools?