Hey! My friend and I run this Geeklog site. But for my blog I find that I can not switch to Geeklog for these reasons:

1. Full support for pinging upon an update using XML-RPC (maybe like an Admin panel were you can add and delete sites to ping?)

2. Blogger (which powers my site) has a thing (look at the VERY top of my blog) were you click "NEXT" and it takes you to an recently updated Blogger Blog (this drives me some good trafic). Can the Geeklog community do something like this?

These are all the changes I would like to see! No more for me!

P.S. It would be nice to see trackbacks!

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Sam Krupa

There are feature requests for ping and trackback already. Haven't looked into trackback, but the problem with the ping is that the sites to ping cause quite a noticable delay (see the feature request for details).

The problem with the "next blog" link is that there is no central listing of all Geeklog sites from which you could get the URL of the "next" blog ...

bye, Dirk

Yea, I saw the feature request about the pinging but it does not handle it a way that is easy. Can't the server do the pinging after the story is posted without slowing the user down?

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Sam Krupa

You can always ask fellow geeklog users with similar interest as yours if they want to exchange links. From there you can create a block linking to their sites. That would probably work better than a webring because you'll wind up with a partner site you may not like and if they don't get much traffic chances are you won't get a lot either. Also I think webrings aren't very efficient traffic builders for most people.

That is a idea but the webrings require NO maintenance. I already do some link exchanging but the webring still brings a lot of traffic.

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Sam Krupa

I had a look at the trackback specification now. Getting Geeklog to accept trackback pings shouldn't be too complicated.

What I don't quite understand is how those are sent in the first place (from a user's perspective - the technical side is quite clear). Can anyone who actually used this in some other weblog shed some light on this?

So assume you have a site running Geeklog and you write a short story about the new Geeklog release. What would you do now to indicate that you want a trackback ping to be sent to the release announcement on geeklog.net?

Should Geeklog present you with an option (and a form) to send the trackback ping to a URL of your choice? Are you going to point it to the story's URL or to the trackback URL?

There's a way to auto-detect trackback URLs. Should Geeklog scan your post for URLs and try to detect the trackback URLs and send the trackback ping out automatically? Looks like that would be doable, but it's a) quite a bit of work and b) may introduce a noticable deley (several seconds).

How do other weblogs handle this?

bye, Dirk

There's a php class for trackbacks that can be found here. You should be able to make it work with geeklog with no problem.This site is for how movable type handles pings here. I think to send a ping you should be able to send one after your story is published. Like this...

Create story

Fields: Name...body...etc...

Additional field: Is this a trackback? Click checkbox [ ]

Then the user saves the new story and if the checkbox was chosen there would be an additional step. Note the story is already saved to the database. From there the user has to fill out the ping url. The user's shown what will be passed to, in this case, geeklog.net's trackback.php. Something like

Title:
Blog Name : GeeklogWorks.com (equal to site_name)
Excerpt: [truncated if necessary]
Url: [site_url]/article.php?story=[sid(storyid)]

The user can then fill out the ping url and, click submit. From there if it was successful(if the story id exists) the xml success code would be read(you can find this code in the php class) and you can display a success message otherwise display an error message. Let me know if this is what you're asking for.

If anyone's feeling adventurous: Trackback support is now in CVS. Backups and having at least a rough idea what you're doing are strongly recommended ...

Comments about the usability, compatibility with other weblogs, etc. are welcome.

bye, Dirk

Thank you so much! I'll try it out in a couple days

Dirk, I've just noticed my site now has Trackback capability! Is there some sort of Geeklog Trackback 101 that can show me how I might use it?

Thanks,

R.

There will of course be documenation for this in 1.3.12.

For now, please see here. Unfortunately, I messed up the first 2 URLs in that post. They should of course read http://geeklog.info/article.php/neue-features (not .../trackback.php/...).

bye, Dirk