1) Key Problems with Movable Type. If you’re a Movable Type user then you probably share a few key experiences with me. To start off with, you’ve probably mis-spelt it Moveable Type more than a few times. You’ve probably chortled to yourself as you realised your mistake. How foolish you’ve been. Ha! The other thing you’ve probably done at some point is scratch your head to the point of bleeding about this whole “Trackback” malarky. I know I have. I know because my outboard brain tells me so.
2) Solve the Trackback confusion by turning on ‘Autodiscovery’. One of the most confusing aspects of the whole Trackback debacle is this idea that a different URL is used to ping for trackback than the URL that you use to visit the post itself. This aspect of the relationship is essentially very simple, but it’s quite hard to explain and so remains essentially incomprehensible to many web-users. So it’s important wherever possible to not draw attention to this process – in fact to conceal its workings as much as possible. The best way to do that is by encouraging the use of autodiscovery. Autodiscovery works like this – when you post something that includes a link to a trackback-enabled weblog, your version of Movable Type goes and has a look at the trackback-enabled weblog’s page and tries to find the trackback URL associated with the thing you’re linking to. Then it pings it. Nice and easy. You don’t have to know the trackback URL (which means they don’t have to display the trackback URL anywhere as well). It also means that there’s no clunky manual pinging process. It’s all nice and neat and self-contained and (more importantly) easy to explain to punters. So why don’t you go anc check that autodiscovery is turned on right now…
3) Trackback manners. In fact, I think there’s probably only one set of circumstances where it’s not a good idea to use auto-discovery, and that’s the same set of circumstances when it’s not appropriate to use Trackback at all. As far as I’m concerned there are at least two of these. Firstly, there’s when you don’t accept trackback pings yourself. Frankly, if you’re not prepared to maintain your place in the embedded conversation, then you don’t deserve to participate at all. The other circumstance when you shouldn’t enable Trackback at all is when you’re maintaining a pure and commentary-less link-log – like the side-panels on kottke.org or anil dash. I think it’s important to try and remember what Trackback is for and what it’s not for – it’s not supposed to be simply a way for you to get a link to your site on highly-trafficked weblogs (although clearly that’s what some people use it for). It’s supposed to be a way of maintaining the links between posts in such a way that the thread of a conversation can be maintained. If you’re not contributing to the conversation in any way, then there’s no need for you to use Trackback. In fact every time you do so, you slightly diminish the utility of Trackback and the likelihood of people following the links therein…