Trackbacks - How to use them?

I’ve used a lot of blogging platforms over the last few years while I was trying to find out which ones I like best and which offer the tools and capabilities I want.

I did a lot of blogging using Blogger, which doesn’t support trackbacks, so I never really understood what they were all about.

So, this morning, I decided it was time to sort this out.

This blog is powered by WordPres version 2, and I have trackback and pingback enabled, so I should be able to point to another blog entry and the trackback should be automatic.

My first reason for trying to understand this was because I wanted to comment on Why Blog Anyway? and I wanted to see if the trackback would work.

Since I didn’t really understand how this works, I did some searching and found an outstanding WordPress Trackback Tutorial that explains much of what I was finding confusing.

I blog on several platforms, as I said, and my main blogs are powered by Userland’s Manilla, Userland’s Radio Userland, and WordPress. As far as I know, the first two do not support automatic trackback pinging, so I think I’ll have to manually enter the trackback URL in the URLs to Ping box when I create the new article.

Once I publish this article, I’ll link to it from John Dilbeck and Friends, using a manual trackback, to see if it works as expected.

I can see that I’ve been missing a powerful tool in communicating with other bloggers. I’ll rectify that today.