Trackback Pings

I was a little annoyed to discover that blogger.com (my blog provider) doesn't support pinging for trackback. But it turns out to be easy to do.

1. Get the track back URL from the target blog.

2. Add four parameters to it:

• title= (the title of your article on your blog)
  
• excerpt= (up to 255 characters from your article)
  
• url= (the permalink URL of your article)
  
• blog_name= (the name of your blog)
  

3. Make this into a URL like this:

track_back_url?title=My%20Article&excerpt=I%20just%20wanted%20write%20a%20sample%20article&url=http://myblog.com/article&blog_name=My%20Blog

Replace italics with actual content. Bold indicates literal conent of the url.

Notice that spaces have been escaped as %20. Depending on the browser you're using this may be unnecessary. There are a number of other escapes that may be necessary but I don't have the escape table in front of me at the moment.

4. Put the URL into your browser's address bar and go.

5. A successful response looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> <response> <error>0</error> </response>

but, it's XML so it may not display properly in your browser (MSIE 6 handles it OK).

Of course, if you're successful, your trackback entry will show up on the target page (remember to reload it).