17 April 2009

Sending Trackback with Blogger

::
Sending a trackback or pingback with Blogger is a highly requested feature. Stephen Weber had once wrote a Greasemonkey script to enable trackback in both old and new versions of Blogger with the added benefit of Delicious tagging and pinging packed. It used to work sometime, and probably because of recent modifications to Blogger code, it simply stopped working after a while.



Yesterday, I gave it another try. Still no go. I checked and rechecked the script but could not find anything wrong. I am not a JavaScript expert, anyway. Then, I noticed an unusual entry in my list of bookmarks: "New Post". Why on earth did I make a bookmark for creating new posts? Considering create-a-post buttons are spread all around in every page of Blogger in Draft, it was weird to say the least.

Having had nothing else to do, I decided to write a post using the bookmark instead of the usual way, and to my surprise, trackback worked. Apparently, during my previous trials of sending trackback, I managed to make it work and bookmarked it.

What does it do? Simple: When using Blogger in Draft, a new post URL is "draft.blogger.com/post-create..." and instead of using this, it simply uses "www.blogger.com/post-create..." when you create a post.

I looked at the script again. Theoretically the wild card should pick up this but it doesn't. I hard-coded the new URL. No, it did not go through, or I made a mistake.

To make a long story short, if you want to send a trackback with Blogger, you have two options until Stephen updates the script (you need Firefox or Epiphany with Greasemonkey and his script installed):

1. If your Blogger navigation bar is visible in your blog, use the "New Post" button there. It points to the correct URL.

2. Create a bookmark like I did.

You will have a working trackback.

Short URL for this post


3 comments:

  1. I'll be honest, I'm still trying to get the hang of this "track back" "ping back" thing. I always make sure to utilize the feature on my blogs, but I don't understand it. Thanks for this information on Blogger. WordPress, on the other hand, makes it very easy to do track backs and ping backs, so that's good. You simple check the boxes. Those who are serious about promoting their blogs will use all the techniques and tools available to get their information out there. Some people avoid the tips and think they don’t need them. Wrong. I do fairly well because I pay attention.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Letting other bloggers and readers know that you wrote an article is a good and "clean" way of attracting new readers (traffic). Although most of the links generated by trackback and/or pingback will be nofollow, they are definitely better than arbitrary links because they will be targeted if we are to use jargon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So, we can't use this option if we have Google Chrome? Darn...

    ReplyDelete