A few days ago I wrote a post on trackback and how incomprehensible it was. And then I got two or three more people to explain it to me and it turns out I understood it all along. The reason I was so dumbfounded was that it seemed like such an unlikely and ungainly solution. It was almost as if someone had written documentation for the process of ‘Opening a can of beans with a banana’. You understand the objective (you must open the can of beans), you understand what a banana is (yellow, pointy, looks a bit like a winkie) and you understand what a can is (tuna and beans come in them). And yet when you try to bring all three elements together, fundamental connections just don’t seem to be being made…
Anyway – the concept is now firmly embedded in my psyche. And just like everyone else with trackback enabled, I have been thinking about how to show off my new functionality and how proud of it I am. So where to start? As with any other design process you try to work out what the thing that you’re trying to design actually is. And that’s when the shock bit happens – you realise that trackback is an automation of the process of saying, “So and so is talking about this post!”. That’s all. Nothing more. And you realise that when you write those words on your site, you never consider it to be something that consitutes a discrete kind of technology at all. In fact, it’s not anything different from the stuff you normally post…
This interests me a lot. It seems like the way we’ve come to build trackback into the our sites works on the principle – first and foremost – that for the purposes of the weblog reader it does constitute something additional – value- / functionality-added. But it’s not! In fact the only reason we’re segregating it from the body of our posts is because it’s got a different name. Most of my site is comprised of ‘includes’ of one kind or another, but I never feel the need to draw attention to that fact. And I don’t think one should do that with trackback either.
So here’s how it’s going to work. This site is totally Trackback enabled (or at least I hope it is – I haven’t tested it very much yet). But you won’t see a trackback URL for hand-pinging anywhere – if you can see it operating – if you can see the gears spinning – then as far as I’m concerned, the design has failed. Every trackback ping will be presented as if it were part of the post it’s linking to rather than an appended piece of information. And that’s not just on the individual post’s page, but also on the index page of plasticbag.org itself. Obviously this places restrictions on the amount of information that I can display wiithout de-emphasising the rest of the content too heavily, but I think its the best approach.
And the best thing? Hopefully you’ll never see the word ‘trackback’ on this site again…