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Chris Schmidt's Journal


[info]crschmidt

geek, tetris, roller coaster, cars, kiss, moo, hooray, powebook, mugshot, messyhair, cute, webcam, goldschlager, ipod, sears, complex, rps, geeky, gun, julianne in pjs, coaster, formal, drinking, brainy, S2 Hooker, work, camera, pho, food, hug, resistance, atcomputer, Alicia, pensive
24th July, 2004 at 12:56 am

Trackback

I've dumped Trackback for this journal for a number of reasons:


  • It wasn't used

  • It wasn't perfect

  • It was annoying



First reason is that it simply wasn't used. Although I think that trackback is a cool idea in principle, in practice, it has a long way to go because the number of tools out there that support it is simply too few. I tried to make it easier for people, but since most of my readers (and therefore, most people who would link to me) are LJ users, pinging doesn't happen. There's too much work involved, and the people posting simply don't see a return. In addition to that, Technorati does all the work of trackback without any of the effort, making it largely redundant.

It didn't work perfectly. I used a mathematical function to calculate the entry number and send it to a wordpress post, but that for some reason didn't work on some older posts. More importantly, it required me to keep the two sources in sync, something I was doing manually because I couldn't get the wordpress->lj working and was too lazy to figure out why. In addition, because of the limitations that LJ has on text - comment text, for example, is stripped - including the RDF to have auto detection was not how it should be, and I didn't test it to even make sure it worked. So, it just was hacky and ugly and a mess.

It was annoying to have the longer text, as well as to try and make people click the links, which they never did anyway. It was annoying to have it there and have people not know what it was. It was annoying to have the text that wasn't used taking up space.

With technorati playing the same role as trackback, and trackback really being useless in general, I'm dumping it. If you want to ping me, use the wordpress (http://crschmidt.net/wordpress). Otherwise, just comment and let me know. That's easier most of the time anyway.

Sad that trackback didn't work. I wonder if it can be reused for other things that could use it more effectively.

| Comment | Read 5 | Link
From: [info]taral
Date: July 23rd, 2004 - 10:34 pm (UTC) (Link)
Yup, same thing I noticed... requiring pings just doesn't work.
(Reply) (Thread)
From: [info]fool_in_spirit
Date: July 24th, 2004 - 01:14 am (UTC) (Link)
I always found lj to be far inf front than other services in terms of comment. For example we allow html, and the comments are generally organised in a tree. Something which most of the services out there don't give. Yet here you say:
"the limitations that LJ has on text - comment text, for example,"

what are those limitations? (I mean, apart not having javascript)?

P.
(Reply) (Thread)
From: [info]crschmidt
Date: July 24th, 2004 - 07:47 am (UTC) (Link)
HTML comment text (<!-- -->) is stripped, and since some tools look inside the body tag, for an HTML commented RDF tag, that didn't work. So, when I said "comment" I meant, "HTML comment" not "comment left by another user".

There are a number of restrictions on things you can't use in styles, from certain tags to javascript to flash or embedded objects. Most frustrating (and seemingly pointless to me) is the inability to use HTML comments to hide RDF inside the page. I'm sure there's a reason for it, but it's useful, and I don't understand why it can't be used.

I'm kind of bemoaning the lack of javascript as well - but I understand the reason why it's stripped, so I'm not upset about it.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
From: [info]fool_in_spirit
Date: July 24th, 2004 - 10:12 am (UTC) (Link)
thanks, that makes sense.

Pietro
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
From: [info]asciident
Date: July 25th, 2004 - 11:23 pm (UTC) (Link)
I believe the reason HTML comments are stripped are because it "wastes" bandwidth by sending out info that won't be displayed. I may be misremembering.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
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