Morning all,
I have a support ticket open at the moment querying the functionality behind auto-trackback discovery.
I wanted to post a snippet of my question here to see how other users of MT4.2 handle this. This is by no means meant to subvert the support system, I'm just interested in hearing some other opinions:-
If I understand correctly, MT will run the auto trackback discovery when the written entry gets set to Published, from either Draft or Scheduled I presume. If a referenced URL contains the special RDF code then auto discovery will work and trackback pings will be sent, in addition to any manually entered Trackback URLs.
That seems to give the entry author a problem:-
How does the author know whether the linked page contains the special RDF code that triggers auto discovery?
Is the author expected to examine the page source for any linked pages manually to see if the RDF code is present, and upon finding it lacking then search for a manual trackback link? If so then the author may as well add any trackback links, including the special RDF you mention, into the manual trackback box and be done with it thus negating the need for auto-discovery.
This seems to produce two usage scenarios.
1) The author relies on auto-discovery, writes their entries and is then disappointed when expected trackback pings are not sent due to auto-discovery failing to find a relevant link
2) The author manually checks each and every referenced page for trackback links and enters them manually.
Do I have the above correct?
How do other people handle trackback pinging?
Rob
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
They don't, nor do they have to care. That's why it's auto-discovery. (Sounds snippy, but that's my answer.)
This one's a little trickier(read: I don't have an answer for you), mainly because I've never really understood what a visible trackback link is supposed to be for, other than possibly an application that does trackback but not auto-discovery. Can you think of one?
If you feed the URL straight to a browser, you just get a message telling you not to do that. It's only really usable to an application. I also can't imagine a single person who'd actually spend the time to check every single page they're linking to determine this. Meaning I personally consider this a problem with the site being linked, which should just have put up the auto-discovery code in the first place. So what to do? Send the publisher an e-mail and hope they listen to you.