Trackback: Angel breath or demon spawn?
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2003 at 01:40 PM [GMT-6]

OK, forgive the lame-o title. I went to the grocery store this morning, and some of the tabloid headlines are still racing around my few still-functioning neurons.

But as long as you're here...did you notice that I've activated TrackBack on the Gazette? Of course you did, for you are an astute observer and wise in the ways of the blogosphere. Unlike me, until the long-suffering Bryan at AWS took me aside and gently whacked me upside the head, advising me to get my act together before the blogging demi-quasi-deities consigned me to eternal blogging irrelevance. (Oops; too late.)

Seriously, though, I appreciate Bryan's patience in explaining to me just exactly what TrackBack is intended to do. I had read the MT documentation, and didn't feel blissfully enlightened. Then, I ran across this extended article on Daring Fireball, and experienced disconcerting confusion. But, at Bryan's urging, I turned on TrackBack and...it's cool! Maybe not "change your life" cool, but certainly up there with "rent an unfamiliar DVD and discover a hitherto unknown great little movie worth re-watching" cool.

If you're a blogging n00b, as was I lo these short few hours ago, TrackBack provides automatic notification (via email if you like) whenever someone links to one of your posts. MT also will ping someone else whose post you've linked to in your post, notifying them that they've been linked to. Then they can link back to the linked post and you'll get a notice, that you'll then link to [I think I'm in a loop here folks]...

In fairness to John Gruber at Daring Fireball, I will point to his more recent addenda about TrackBack, where he clarifies some points in his previous essay. He also provides a link to this post in A Whole Lotta Nothing which details a simple hack for using TrackBack in conjunction with WinAmp to keep an updated "What's Playing Now" list on your blog sidebar. There's also a similar AppleScript/iTunes combo for Mac users.

So, there you have it. Whereas I once thought TrackBack is what you did while hiking with a GPS, I now know that it's something more... something different... and yet, something similar. And that, my friends, you can take to the bank.