TrackBack Primer

Those of you with blogs should read this excellent explanation of trackback, written by the developers of TrackBack and Movable Type (MT). Even if you don’t use MT, that article provides some good, non-technical explanations of how to use TrackBack, regardless of your blogging tool. One use that I discovered is the ability to have your posts listed on a content aggregating site, like TopicExchange. That will allow people to go to a central place to find posts on basketball, for example. I can easily setup my blog to TrackBack (ping) any of my posts in my basketball category over to TopicExchange’s basketball topic. Then anyone interested in finding bloggers posting on basketball could find my post in the TopicExchange. Of course when I learned this I looked for a ‘stock market’ topic, and I was shocked to see that there wasn’t one yet. So I just created a stock market topic. You can TrackBack to that topic by using this URL – http://topicexchange.com/t/stock_market/ . Hopefully people (yeah you Charles) will start using this feature more, and we can get a nice repository for stock market commentary.

And while I’m on the subject of blogs, my vote in this week’s new blog showcase is Technically Speaking.