[geeklog-devtalk] Request for feedback: Trackback usability?

[Dirk Haun]

Since a few people here seem to be running the current version from CVS,
I'd like to hear some feedback on the usability of the trackback (and
ping and pingback) features, please.


In the meantime, here's some experience of my own: Yesterday, I tried to
send my first real trackbacks and promptly ran into a few problems ...

1) The trackback preview didn't work. Fixed in CVS ...

2) For the trackback comment, I wanted to quote a piece of text further
down in my post, but the trackback editor currently only includes the
story's introtext, not the bodytext. Going to fix that soon.

This also gave me the idea to provide a link to the actual story (in the
trackback editor), so that you can view it more easily. Going to add
that, too.

3) The pingbacks timed out on me :-(

The article in question contained 16 links. Apparently, trying to send a
pingback to all those sites took longer than the (pretty liberal) script
timeout that I have on my shared hosting account. That's not good.

So far I see two possible options to work around that: I could either
send one pingback at a time, then do a meta refresh (or header redirect),
send the next, and so on. Apart from being a lot of work to implement (I
would have to store the links temporarily somewhere), this would also
produce some load for the site.

Plan B would be to present the user with a list of the links and let them
select / deselect the sites to ping from there. Which of course requires
you to know which sites accept pingbacks, which sort of defeats the whole
idea of auto-detecting sites that accept pingbacks.

Anyone got any better ideas?

bye, Dirk


-- 
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