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Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Trackback is dead! It made sense in a world without PubSub (or any other technology that can track links to anywhere on your site AFAIK Technorati and Feedster can't do this for free and/or for technical reasons. I understand Technorati's link search will be free but their site still says that you only get 3 watchlists for free.). Now all PubSub needs to do is offer an API (please give us an REST API; Jabber is fine but it's too heavyweight for most blogging systems and the need to run a Jabber server makes the barrier to entry too high!) so their link search can be built into blogging systems and it's game over for Trackback.
From Some Things Aren’t Worth Saving.:
QUOTE
I remember back when Trackback was first introduced. I was like everyone else, jumping up and down at this new way of "threading the void". Well, we've just been hung dry on the threads and we've all come crashing down. AKMA writes today, "Trackback is broken", and I concur. It was broken right from the start, but we didn't know it because it seemed to work, or at least, work the way most people thought it should work.
UNQUOTE
Comments
TrackBack has it's downfalls
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Amen. Regular humans (and plenty of bloggers) don't understand what the hell it is.
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Roland: One problem with all of that... Trackback works, while third-party services seldom do.
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
er actually Roger, Trackback doesn't work. Every new blog system seems to go thru the same pain of figuring out how to make it work. And in all the time I've used PubSub it has "just worked" I have noticed far less down time with PubSub then incorrectly configure or coded Trackback in blog systems.
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Technorati provides free watchlists by URL and keyword as well as API calls with RSS output (http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/CosmosQuery) that allow 500 queries per day per user. Assuming your RSS reader requests feed updates every hour for 24 hours a day you would have 20 API subscriptions and 3 watchlists for a total of 23.
Currently Technorati restricts users to 15 watchlists created on our site but that could change at any time.
Adam Kalsey and David Raynes have written Movable Type plugins using the Technorati API to produce output similar to TrackBack listings.
Feedster also has an API (http://varchars.com/blog/node/view/138) if you prefer. You will need to use your Feedster private key.
If you need any help getting started please let us know!
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
thanks for the reply, Niall but after re-reading your docs Technorati doesn't do what i want namely:
if anybody links ANYWHERE on my site, not just 1 URL, ALL URLs, then I want to be notified
Technorati does 1 URL for up to 23 watchlists but what I really want is for a single watchlist to be able to watch all URLS on a site not just one (e.g. all links anywhere on rolandtanglao.com not just a link to rolandtanglo.com/foo.html for example via 1 watchlist not 1 watchlist per URL)
Does Technorati do that? I don't think so but I'd love to be proven wrong!
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Roland, PubSub already has a REST API! (see: http://pubsub.com/REST/) If you were to use our REST API to subscribe to something like: "URI:rolandtanglao.com" you would get REST (HTTP POST) messages sent to whatever endpoint on your servers you like. Isn't that all you want/need? If you need more or something else, send me mail and we can work it out...
Also, the Jabber/XMPP stuff *does not* require that you run a Jabber server. All you need is a client and you can easily write one in php, perl, python, or any other language that can create a TCP/IP socket. To connect to your "Atom over XMPP" subscription feed all you need to do is: 1) Create a socket, 2) Send a few XML stanzas to "log in" 3) listen for new packets as they arrive and then handle them. It couldn't be much simpler... See my tutorial on the subject (it needs updating...) on our tools page at: http://www.pubsub.com/tools.php
bob wyman
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
thanks, Bob, for a while the REST page was deprecated or inaccessible IIRC
I will check it out and post a follow-up!
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Hmm.... It's been a while since I mentioned the PubSub REST API page to anyone. It may be that it needs updating -- as does the XMPP tutorial... After a quick scan a moments ago, it looks to me like what is there is accurate -- if incomplete -- we've added a bunch of stuff since that was written, but what's there should work fine for your trackback application. Let me know if you have any problems and I'll try to address them.
bob wyman
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Roland,
Technorati already does this. #1: You can get an UNLIMITED number of free watchlists, we removed all limitations about 2 months ago. Any documentation that is still on the site is a bug, and we will fix, but note - it is a documentation problem, not a service issue. #2: You can get exactly what you want by using either the Technorati API or by using a watchlist for the base URL of your blog, either will work, depending on what you want to do. I'm happy to walk you through it, feel free to drop me a line or give me a call directly at 415 846-0232.
Dave
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
ok, mea culpa dave, sorry but it's not clear from the current documentation on your site
I will definitely try this out this week and will call you and/or email you if I run into problems
thanks for your patience!
...Roland
re: Trackback is dead, Use PubSub
Just as a point of reference, TrackBack does category pinging, and lets you retrieve a feed of pings to a particular TrackBack URL. There's no way to do those things with centralized services.
In addition, TrackBack is a record of an explicit action, not just a link, which means you can TrackBack a post that's related, even if you didn't specifically link to it.
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