Sillyness, werd

Trackback VS Pingback… revisited

UPDATE I will try again and make this as plain as possible.

The two specs achieve the same goals using XML-RPC.  With Trackback you cannot use the URLs in the post itself for the trackback, it must be entered somewhere else, at least it is that way for those of us using b2.  Also you can only trackback one post per entry into your blog.

With Pingback it uses the URLs already residing in your post, there is no need to input them again, as well as they fact that all the URLs in your post are pinged, not just one.  As an example the link to your post on this subject below is being pinged back, you don’t see it because MT does not give you that capability out of the box.   If I also linked to a post by Our Man Bishop and Kevin Basil on this subject they would be automagically pinged back as well, just because they are in my post and I have it set to ping back all URLs; I do nothing other than put them in the body of the post as I normally would and pingback takes care of the rest.  As I understand it with Trackback you would have to pick which site would be tracked back to and input that one as the Trackback for that post.

I don’t know any way to put this any more straight forward so hopefully this will do Bacchus.

Well the unsinkable Dr. Bacchus has stated that some of us need to attend to our Trackback systems.

While I am sure that some of the people mentioned in his post might have a configuration problem, mine is more about choice; I despise the trackback mechanism and utilize the more robust and open-source pingback, and here’s why:

With pingback everything is wrapped around open technology, and it is open to development. One big point in Pingbacks favor in my estimation is the fact that it requires much less from the user to make it work. In pingback, any URL contained in the post is pinged back to the appropriate blog/journal without requiring another step from you and allowing multiple pingbacks per post.

On the other hand with Trackback, you are tied to only one trackback per post, as well as the fact that you have now two steps to “ping” the other blog.  Not only do you have to include the URL of the off-site post in the body of your post, you have to remember to throw it into the track back a URL box located somewhere else (at least in my case with b2 this is the way it must be done).  These things coupled with the fact that it is a part of Movable Type which is a proprietary system makes it a LUSER in my book.

And I do concede that there are some projects to shall we say “re-invent the wheel” that is trackback providing an open-source implementation for the rest of us, but with the power and simplicity of Pingback I don’t see them going anywhere.