Okay after a day of testing and tweaking, I want to quickly test a few sites that support Trackback with discovery, and then get ready to write some docs.

• Movable Blog
• Zawodny
• Byte.Org
• DHMTW
• Ryan Lowe

They all worked. I don't think I broke anything.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/25/03; 8:01:47 PM - --

From Phil Ringnalda, via email:

Not quite Murphy, who's the patron saint of people who refuse to upgrade? TB
1.0 not only used about="", it also used GET rather than POST. I've seen
people saying that their rough guide is to use GET if the trackback URL has
a ? and POST if it has /123, but because some people have a server setup
that doesn't work with the PATH_INFO method, they'll use ?tb_id="" even with
a newer, POST accepting version (like Zawodny is). So I'd say, at a guess,
if you get it from trackback:ping you should POST, and if you get it from
about, you should GET.

Brill! I bet this is the answer. Going to take a break, when I get back I'm going to try pinging Sifry with this regime.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/25/03; 10:35:01 AM - --

I'm testing the new support for Trackback in Manila, in development. Here's a document that will explain how it works. It's necessary because this feature is going to be hard to support. What happens when it doesn't work? How do you troubleshoot it? Any advice is welcome. I'm turning on comments. Please don't flame me.

Anyway -- here are some pages that have Trackbacks.

• Dave Sifry review of ENT. Lots of problems here, some I can deal with, one that's a deal-stopper. First, there isn't a trackback:ping element in the discovery RDF, so I use the "about" element for the URL of the ping handler. Second, the date is incorrectly formatted, so I have to fail back to the current date/time; since it doesn't appear in the UI it's not a problem, yet. However when I ping the URL in the about element, I get an error back, Need a Trackback ID (tb_id), which is weird because the URL very clearly contains one. Maybe someone can shed light on this. I see that his server is getting pings from others, so there must be some way to make this work. Finally at 1:08PM it worked. Lots of guessing, following rumors, etc -- the old method is not documented anywhere I could find. Trial and error eventually got me the answer.
• Andrew Grumet on New Hampshire blogs. Worked.
• Byte.Org on choice. Worked.
• Big Damn Heroes. No <RDF> element for auto-discovery. We require it. No ping without it. Note, this is not a MT site. Excellent.
• Movable Blog.
• Gnome-Girl.
• Moveable Type demo site. Didn't work at first. Emailed with Ben Trott, got it working.
• Zawodny. Worked.
• Tribblescape.
• Digitala Bonder. Worked.
• Proceedings of the Radial Symmetry Institute. Worked.
• The importance of experience. Worked.
• Roger Ebert and democracy. Worked.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/25/03; 8:06:17 AM - --

I made a change in outbound trackback today, now it does the discovery-ping operation in a separate thread, so if the target is slow, the user doesn't have to wait; or if we're checking lots of pointers. As usual I'm using Phil's server to test. It worked. Now to test with my MT server. Both tests worked.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 4/25/03; 7:52:53 AM - --