About
TrackBack provides an automated way to insert links that talks about the actual page.
When I cite you, you cite me
An automatic mechanism to notify a blog that it was cited in a post.
The TrackBack specification was created by Six Apart, which first implemented it in its Movable Type blogging soft- ware in August 2002
There are similar protocol, such as:
- Refback,
- Ping-back
However they are not as popular as TrackBack, which is supported by every major blog platform except Blogger.
Implementation
The TrackBack mechanism is implemented in two parts:
- the auto-discovery mechanism
- and the notification page.
AutoDiscovery
The auto-discovery mechanism uses a small RDF fragment added to each blog post that tells other blogs to which page they should submit their TrackBack.
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns\#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/"
>
<rdf:Description
rdf:about="http://blog.foo.com/mypost"
dc:identifier="http://blog.foo.com/mypost"
dc:title="my post"
trackback:ping="http://blog.foo.com/trackback/mypost" />
</rdf:RDF>
Notification
The noti cation page is the web page dedicated to collecting TrackBacks and processing them.
An HTTP POST request sent to the noti cation page. It contains four values:
- the post title,
- its URL,
- an excerpt,
- and the blog name.
Example
POST http://www.example.com/TrackBack/5
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
title=Foo&url=http://www.bar.com/&excerpt=My+Excerpt&blog_name=Foo