I love trackback. Using trackback, the link between web pages becomes a both-ways communication, a “discussion” between web pages. Trackback has been introduced by weblogs, but I do not understand why it has to be limited to them. I would like to see more trackback-aware web pages, not only blogs.
So, I decided to make the report pages of g-metrics.com trackback-aware. These URLs have the form of http://g-metrics.com/index.php?act=details&ID=xxx where xxx is the internal id of the report. They display the history of a query to google, the number of results returned by google on a daily basis. People tend to link to these pages as an extra source of data to prove a point. I am interested to be able to link back to these pages, so trackback sounds like the right tool.
Writing the code to support trackback turned out to be quite simple, following th instructions I found at http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/trackback/.
Then I added a link to it from all reports pages. I also added some code in the reports page that looks for trackbacks stored in the database and displays them.
As simple as that. I am really qurious to see how this will turn out to be. There are some issues that may need to be taken care of such as spam profing the whole system so that it won’t be used by a robot to add the same trackback to every page.
I am also curious if g-metrics.com should send a pingback to the top-10 URLs presented in these reports. I am afraid it could be considered spam so I need to give it some more thought first.
(Example: this page tracked back http://g-metrics.com/index.php?act=details&ID=56)